Here's my advice. If you don't need the money (family to support, etc), then become a lab rat for a while, then go to work for someone like Cerner, SunLabs, or HCDC (now bought by someone else) who does automation for healthcare.

This field is quickly becoming very hot right now, because the terms of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) are forcing companies to make super major changes to their computer systems in a 1-2 year time window.

I realize that traditionally, healthcare is a trail of tears, but the passage of HIPAA is forcing many hospitals to fund Y2K-like efforts to upgrade and enhance their systems.

As for OO and your table-based programming, our latest Java pharmacy claims processor does both. It loads in pharmacy claims definition tables into arrays of objects, parses different forms of pharmacy claims, and the either stores them into our database, or writes it out in either a Properties file, or writes it back out as a valid pharmacy claim message.

Use the best tools for the job. OO is not all goodness, and tables aren't all badness, either. The best programmers steal techniques from everywhere.

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But I am physically kinda clumsly (the same way I am verbally clumsy :-) I would probably desolve my hand in acid within a month. Would they tolerate somebody like that long enuf for promotion (assuming I wear acid-proof gloves)?
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Because of clumsy lab assistants, a lot of the lab tests are done via equipment. In many cases, you don't even take the lids off of blood, etc. The machine does. Secondly, you'll become a lot more careful when you realize that each vial of blood you carry potentially has HIV or Hepatitis B. Instead of being a goof, you become very careful because not being careful could be fatal. If you don't have that temperment, then perhaps you belong in sales (with all the other goofs). A careless/clumsy temperment doesn't work well in IT or programming, either.

As for the properties file, understand that we're really using the database call interface the most, because it is the most valuable. We did the properties file because it was easy to implement.