[IAmBroom]

Me, just the opposite, but my dad was a jeweler, so my context was much better informed. I was positively surprised by how cool rocks looked after smoothing and then polishing.

Slightly older, I graduated to polishing cabachons on a grinder system.

Teenage me learned to solder gold rings to new sizes, which benefitted young electrical engineering me - gold and lead solder very similarly.

All of this, I now realize, was more-or-less a planned arc/quasi-apprenticeship training for the family store.