works of wanderlust

Tag: working woes

  • what’s in a name

    I have been inching towards some contracting work. Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed and in many ways I’m five steps ahead of myself here, but ultimately, all things being equal, my end game in this adventure is to start doing this kind of thing on the regular and actually get paid for it.

    I’ve officially taken a stab, and its an optimistic one, but if I’m being honest wih myself not even really a favourable one.

    That said, my guide on this adventure did politely inform me that if things proceeded to the next step I would need to do something much more than personal introspection: I would need to set up a business. Legit. Corporate registry, tax account number, bank account, government filing documents, legit.

    Not a big deal. It’s just time and money and effort. I can handle it.

    But what’s got me hung up is that when I do all that legit business stuff, I actually need to call myself something. I can’t just hang an Inc off my name and go from there. I need a business name.

    I wouldn’t say that I’ve been good at naming stuff, but I’ve certainly been prolific. I have registered dozens of domain names over the years and let nearly as many lapse, each a little project or business idea that I threw against the wall hoping it would stick. I have created funny and clever handles for social media accounts. I have given myself an artistic pen name and am currently writing a video game under a clever (and unregistered) studio name, though neither of those really encompass the tone of professionalism that I would hope to impart with a corporate registration name that someone would need to put on an invoice, you know?

    And is my way, I tend to trudge along with the bigger plan, ever forward, even while swatting at the air as it buzzes around me with these pesky little problems that need solving.

    What’s in a name? Everything, in many ways. 

    All those previous names I have mentioned were chosen to impart a sense of casual disconnectedness from my professional self, as odd as that might seem. I wanted to add a jagged edge to my art when I called myself “squwetchy” online for that. I used the name “pixelazy” for my photography for a while throwing a broad tone of just-a-guy-with-a-camera snapping photos into the digital ecosphere. My online coder-guy presense has always been wrapped in this very domain name “8r4d” a kind of throwback to the geekily trend of numeric hacker lingo that I secured in a domain name nearly a quarter century ago now. All of them are little slivers of me, but none are my professional self, and none of them convey a kind of marketable trust that even I would look at and go “let’s hire them…”

    So I have entered the realm of needing to tangle myself up with a very official, very long term, corporate identity. And I find myself thinking I may need to do that sooner than later. Even inching towards something might get you there eventually, right?

  • derailed

    I’ve been tiptoeing around the realities of my recent detour into part time work partly because I was trying to keep myself sane and partly because I was trying to avoid offending anyone there who may have stumbled upon this blog.

    No one ever did, of course.

    But as I’ve written a couple times now, I recently quit that job. I quit so recently, in fact, that I’m technically still just “between shifts” as far as my regular schedule there went. It hasn’t sunk in. It hasn’t had time to sink in. I still reflexively checked the app this morning to make sure I wasn’t missing something… you know, before that first coffee kicked in.

    But I’ve been sitting here thinking about the whole thing and feeling a lot of regret. I’ve been sitting here thinking how agreeing to go back for a second round was a big mistake.

    It wasn’t the people. First off, let me put that down.

    But here’s the backstory: Last August I decided I wasn’t quite ready to go back and get a real job, or at least I was still romanticizing the notion of a larger scale shift in my career, so I was dabbling. I thought maybe I’ll dabble in the retail grocery industry and see where it takes me for a bit. I promptly found myself working for a local small business that was expanding in our community and (insert complex business mumbo jumbo here) I got a part time gig helping build that out, launch it, and work in it. I mean that literally. I literally helped assemble shelves, frantically help customers on opening day, and then physically stumbled through the chaotic warehouse for the first two months of operation. A lot of bullshit decisions got made by people (and I can say that without flinching because when I did go back the new management literally apologized for the conditions under which I ultimately left in December). I walked away the first time, which was a bummer because I had left the little pipe dream behind but also because it was supposed to keep me busy for the cold, cold winter months. I could write for pages and pages about that time (and I have in personal documents) but I simply need to tell you that was the first time I quit.

    I did keep busy, tho, for that cold, cold winter.

    There are days and days of cold when you don’t even want to leave the house. You just crank the space heater and wrap up in slippers and a blanket and forget that anything outside exists.

    I started work on a video game.

    I made serious progress on my novel.

    And, more importantly, I went back to school. I signed up for a serious continuing education course program that consisted of seven modules of Business Analyst Certification training involving course work and post-lecture assignments.

    And I was doing great.

    There is a whole elaborate string of coincidences and conversations that led me back to the grocery store. Promises. Idealized futures. Criss-crossed expectations, mostly.

    And so for two and a half months I put an apron back on, resumed making myself available for shift work, and there I was back working. And for the first month (singular) of that back to work time it was great. They had some programs I was supporting. They had big goals for how they, as the third set of management in six months, were going to clean up the store and put it back on the rails. Whatever had happened in those months since we first walked in the building to build the shelves, something had derailed it to near crashing. I was helping, not just literally, but actually making a measurable difference to the success of the store. I had purpose.

    So I was back. And it was fine. It was fine. Really. Fine. Until it wasn’t.

    Because going back, simply, sadly, frankly, it derailed me.

    I’ve been tiptoeing around this. I’ve been writing about my struggles with multitasking and my thoughts on working towards bigger goals, and sure… all of that is true. But the reality of it is that taking on this stupid little low-paying part time job, as much as it was good for my social health and my getting out of the house motivation, it derailed everything that was important to me.

    Derailed me hard.

    My game development efforts waned.

    My writing, save for my reflective blogging, ground to nearly a halt.

    My school work measurably suffered as I rushed assignments and squeezed them into the spaces between even just those handful of infrequent shifts.

    I arguably gave it too much. I arguably didn’t compartmentalize. I arguably stumbled over my own metaphorical shoelaces and let it trip me up and throw me off. But it all of those things are true and more, too.

    The whole experience made me feel lesser. Despondently so. I was seriously becoming borderline depressed at the inertia that this stupid little job was consuming in my life. I would go to a shift, and with each shift it seemed like I had less purpose in the store, futzing around trying to fill my block of paid time with useful tasks that were become increasingly rare as they shuttered programs and made alternate plans to the handshake deals they had blue-skied when I first started, and all while getting yet another day further from the things where I was making real actual progress in my life: professional development, tangible skills, and measurable outputs towards nearing-completed projects. I was selling not just my time, but selling it to the lowest bidder and throwing in my heart and soul all tangled in the mess of it.

    At least if I’d donated it I’d have felt good about that part. But selling something for less than it’s worth?! Come on!

    The trade off was so imbalanced I can’t even clearly articulate how much it derailed everything that I loved for the uneven trade of time and loyalty and value I was giving to this stupid little store.

    You should shop there. I’m not going to name it, but if you know me you know what it’s called. It is a great little local market filled with cool people and almost certainly being run a thousand times better than when I quit the first time. But it was a terrible fit for me. It hurt me. Every bit of momentum I had gathered before that seemed suddenly at risk and arguably been derailed by my hubris in thinking I could go back and work there again without giving too much of myself. And I haven’t wanted to admit that. But it’s true, and unfortunate.

    It’s been barely thirty six hours since I last walked out of that place and I’m never going back to work there. There is no third act. But I may wander down there with a laptop and get some real work done, work meant for me and work that has purpose for who I need to be, as I get myself back on track.

  • patio season

    It is only just the second day of May and I find myself sitting on the patio at the local Starbucks.

    Yeah, I know. There is a likely chance that you are reading this from somewhere in the world where (a) patio season in May is entirely normal and (b) eighteen degrees would not be considered patio weather whatsoever.  But I am writing this from a place in the world where the second of May is just as likely to be a snowy inside day as it is to be one facilitating a coffee from a suburban bistro table two meters from a bustling drive through.  So I’ll take it where I can get it, and celebrate it just the same.

    It is also my first writing excursion since walking out of my latest life phase: if you are a dedicated reader (but who am I kidding?) you may recall that I wrote earlier this week that I had quit my part time job. Resigned. Hung up my apron. De-shifted in order to pursue some more mentally stimulating contract-type work, and as I sit here sunning the light reflecting off a mini-mall cafe, it still hasn’t quit sunk in that yesterday was my last day juggling expired foods and lugging boxes of olive oil. It will, but there has only just been long enough to mark the space between shifts, so I could walk back in there this morning and only just be a few minutes late for work. I’ll let it settle out a bit more, but either way, I am free of that.

    And now here I am. It is in fact the first day of patio season and the first day of whatever comes next for me, and neither are lacking prospects. The patio function of the equation urges me to stop procrastinating with navel-gazing blog posts and finish my damn novel already, jeeze! The whats next(?) steps part of the same mysterious equation is a little less crystalized and may give me cause to write more about that in a day or a week or so, but not so much yet. There will be time for explanations when the dust settles.

    Patio season is different than the rest of the year for some reason, too.  It is a simple calculated fact that I spend a good chunk of my free winter morning agendas sitting at a table in this or that or other cafes around the neighbourhood. Everyone generally puts their heads down and avoids eye contact. But this morning, sitting and typing at a wobbly little bistro table, tilting my screen to angle it for best visibility in the glare of the outdoor ambiance, I’ve already had two jovial conversations with other patio folks. “What a great day!” “Do you live around here?” “Finally I can ride my bike to the cafe!” The glory of the finally spring mentality has burst through the hunkering isolationism of the winter chill and everyone is just happier enough to glory in the moment.

    Spring is such a cliche for new life I am reluctant to draw such an obvious analogy here, but alas it seems unavoidable. It seems cliche that I have timed my emergence from the chrysalis of career change in such synchronicity with the world around me.

    On my very first day of the job I just quit, back in August, when I arrived to a store-under-construction on a hot late-summer morning, it happened that the sun was shining and the dust was blowing and we all sat on the curb for our coffee break drinking cold pops and munching the assortment of salty snacks they had provided. It had been a hard morning lugging boxes and meeting new people and settling into a physical job. Yesterday, I stepped out the back door of the warehouse into that same alley, now just the cluttered space behind the store, the sun almost a parallel spring analog to that day last summer. We’d been through a winter, made a store, struggling in solidarity against the silliness of it all, and there I was on my last day on that same patch of asphalt almost a year later feeling about as full circle as one could feel about such things. Hardly a patio, but not completely different from where I am starting my day, this new era ahead of me, typing these words.

    It’s patio season. A new one.

  • multitaskable

    I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.

    Now…

    I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.

    I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it? 

    As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated. 

    Maxed out. Capacity reached.

    I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.

    Some may think of this as just a bit of opportunity cost comparison, huh?

    I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered. 

    I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.

    I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.

    It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.

    And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.

    Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my  ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute. 

    And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.