so how did you become an ORACLE DBA?

For me it all started in 1996 in the gym ...

At the time I was working for a meat packing plant -- which was the first job 
that I got after coming to America.  My schedule was pretty hectic starting 
work at 5AM going home at 1PM getting couple of hours of sleep and then going 
to college at night getting back home at 11:30PM.  I knew I needed to do 
something and was on the lookout for new venues ...

Later that year I started going to a gym and seriously got into body building.  
During that time Dorian Yates was dominating the scene once again taking Mr. 
Olympia title.

One day I was working out with a buddy of mine and we started to talk about 
what was the best programming language to learn.  At the time I only knew about 
the usual suspects such as C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal etc..  That's when my 
buddy mentioned ORACLE.  He said that his uncle had a school in Chicago and 
that he'd teach us ORACLE in a year with a job opportunity waiting at the end 
of the school.  I never took him up on this offer but the name stuck and I 
started looking into what ORACLE was.

Fairly quickly I realized that ORACLE was not a programming language but rather 
a database that required a weird proprietary utility called sqlplus to do all 
the "talking".  I managed to get a bootleg copy of personal ORACLE and realized 
that it was over my head and that I needed to take a class or two on ORACLE.

At the time UCLA extensions were offering two tracks:

Oracle DBA Track:
    Relational Database management
    Oracle Database Administration
    Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL Using Procedure Builder 
    Oracle8 Performance-Tuning Workshop 

Oracle Developer Track:
    Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL Using Procedure Builder 
    Developer/2000 Forms I 
    Developer/2000 Forms II
    Developer/2000 Reports 

I decided to take it all starting with Relational Database management following 
up with Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL Using Procedure Builder then 
taking the rest of the Developer track courses and finishing up with Oracle8 
Performance-Tuning Workshop which was actually later on in 1998 after I already 
had an ORACLE job.

I got my first real ORACLE job in 1997 as an ORACLE APPS Developer and in 1998 
I fell into an ORACLE DBA role after which I never looked back.

So what's your story?