I was born and raised in the Monongahela Valley steel town of Clairton, Pennsylvania (Allegheny County), a few miles south of Pittsburgh. I'm a graduate of West Virginia University and have spent most of my career writing, editing and developing proposals for major contracts, mostly in DoD and DoE but also in the private sector.

I had a 10-year career with Westinghouse in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas, before the company divested its heritage business lines and merged with CBS/Viacom. I worked first as a proposal specialist and later as a marketing communication manager. My experience at several of the company's power- and energy-related locations is what got me interested in Wikipedia in the first place.

The Westinghouse sites where I worked over the years include the Advanced Energy Systems Division (Large, Pa.), Advanced Power Systems Business Unit (Waltz Mill site; Madison, Pa.), and the Combustion Turbine Systems Division (Concordville, Pa.). I was involved with the Solar Total Energy Project (STEP) in Georgia from the conceptual design proposal, through its eight-year operational period, to its dismantling in 1991.

I haven't won a lot of awards, but I haven't entered many contests, either. I've been writing and editing proposals for a wide range of technologies for most of my career without any particular expertise in any of them, so I consider myself qualified to edit articles on just about any topic.

I'm proud of my reputation among the engineers and managers with whom I've worked over the years as someone they trust to make editorial revisions -— and even do complete rewrites -— without changing their meaning or intent.

For the record, my name is Joe Fields.

--NameThatWorks 20:19, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

When confronted by a stone wall, play handball.

It's better to regret what you did do, than what you didn't.

You can get over some things in 30 days, most things in 60 days, and anything in 90 days.