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A friend of mine was "downsized" recently, meaning that she lost her job. I tried to cheer her up by telling her that everybody gets canned at least once in a career. It's happened to me.

Of course, my career is writing, so the jobs I got fired from were "day jobs," work I took on to pay the bills in those days before I could support myself from writing alone.

The first time I got fired I was about sixteen years old. I had taken a job as a stock clerk in a major plumbing supply house in South Philadelphia. I worked hard at it — for a week.

At the end of that week the owner came to me, practically teary-eyed, and asked me sadly, "Ben, your heart really isn't in the plumbing supply business, is it?"

I had to admit that it wasn't.

He fired me, of course. But it was obvious to me that his heart truly was in the plumbing supply business and it hurt him to the core that mine wasn't.

Lesson to be learned. Work at a job you enjoy. After all, you're going to be spending most of your waking hours at the job; if you don't like what you're doing, life will be little more than drudgery. And you probably won't be very good at it, anyway.

The second time I got fired, it wasn't my fault. On the other hand, I wasn't arrested for arson, so I guess I got off without too much damage.

Following my own advice, I got myself a job as an usher at a midtown movie theater. Snazzy uniform, and I got to see first-run movies for free.

When Walt Disney's "Treasure Island" hit Philadelphia in 1950, our entire staff of ushers learned the film's complete dialogue in a few days. We could roll off an "Arrgh, matey" almost as well as Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver so deliciously.

Our biggest problem was on weekend matinees when the theater's downstairs lounge would fill to overflowing with youngsters dueling with invisible cutlasses and firing imaginary flintlock pistols at one another. "I got you!" "Nah, you missed!"

We ushers had to take the kids under our arms, literally, and heave them out into the alley behind the theater, from whence they made their way home.

One Sunday morning, though, when I came to work the usher's dressing room was quite cold. One of my colleagues decided to warm us by making a fire. He crumpled up some of the Sunday newspaper, dropped it into an empty G.I. can, and lit it. At that moment the chief of ushers came into the room.

My incendiary cohort slammed the lid on top of the trash can before the chief could notice the pitiful little flicker inside it. But then he lost his cool. He sat on the lid and tried to look innocent.

The chief immediately became suspicious. He yanked my buddy off the can and opened the lid. A puff of smoke issued forth, followed by a high-pitched shriek of "Fire!" No one else was in the theater that early in the day. A paper cup's worth of water extinguished our little blaze. But by the end of the day the two of us were fired by the theater's manager, who threatened to have us arrested for attempted arson.

So I went into newspapering. First as a copyboy at the Philadelphia Inquirer (which paid my tuition through journalism school) and then as an editor-reporter for the weekly Upper Darby News in suburban Philly.

When I learned that the U.S. government was going to try to launch an artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth, I talked myself into a job as a technical editor with the Glenn L. Martin Co. (now Lockheed Martin, an aerospace giant), which was building the launching rocket.

I was recruited to write teaching films for the Physical Sciences Study Committee, which meant moving from Baltimore to the Boston area. I'd been writing fiction all the time, of course, with middling success. But my "day jobs" were paying pretty well, so I didn't complain about getting up before dawn to put in a couple of hours writing before I drove to the office.

Once the PSSC project was finished I was hired by an operational research firm to set up a publications department for them. It wasn't a very difficult task, and within a few months I had a team of typists, illustrators and printers grinding out all the reports and proposals that the company produced.

Things were going well. The "day job" wasn't very exciting but it paid the bills. I even got a publisher to buy a science fiction novel I'd written, my first book sale.

Then one Friday afternoon my boss at the "day job" invited me into his office and told me, with some sorrow, that they were letting me go. He was very roundabout, but it became clear that the publications department was running so smoothly that these management geniuses figured they could save the cost of my salary and the department would run just as well without me.

I demurred and warned that in two or three months they'd be searching for a new department head. I saw their ad in the newspapers about six weeks later.

What to do? I was a published author, but that first novel didn't make enough money to pay the rent. Fortunately, a friend from my old PSSC association connected me with the Avco Everett Research Laboratory, where I was hired to help the scientists write their reports.

I had bounced from a job I had tolerated to one I loved. I would be at AERL to this day if I hadn't been drafted to run the best science fiction magazine in the solar system. I never did get fired again. Eventually I renounced magazine editing and became a full time author and lecturer. And a part-time columnist.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 110 books, including "Titan," his latest novel. Dr. Bova's web site address is www.benbova.com.