7:15 am

Next on the list I could call vocational health but I have to be careful with that term. Vocation evokes a calling to from higher power. What I do for a living is far from that unless you consider avoiding homelessness a calling. A better term would be professional, but seeing as how I am not an athlete nor do I have anything higher than a high school education, it’s difficult for me to accept that nomenclature either.

At any rate, I have to think about my job. As is well established, I don’t make nearly enough money. In fact, I am making the same salary now as I was making in 2006 when I had fewer skills. Taking 20 years to come full circle is a kick in the danglers, but there are reasons to the season. I needed a flexible job without too much mental overhead to get my kids over the finish line.

Single parenthood is no joke.

The good. I enjoy helping people, and I am helping people. . . ish. It is currently a work from home gig, so I get to spend all day with my pets and I do not have to commute. I also don’t have to wear business casual garb. I get to nibble at my chores during the day, and spend more time with the kids. The checks don’t bounce and I have a decent benefits package. I like my boss and my coworkers so it’s fine.

It’s fine.

As for the bad, there isn’t a whole lot. It’s a job. It’s annoying at times but nothing about what I do is critical and no one really takes notice. If I have any hope of applying for something internal it would help if I had some visibility. I am not entirely certain I can rely on someone else advocating for me. This also means I lack any power to improve my station.

Some may disagree with that statement, and in some regard I do was well. Sometimes you have to take the reins and go so far above and beyond that you become undeniable. Sometimes you have to wow the shit out of management and come behind it with heavy demands. Sometimes you have to do other people’s work with no recognition for the sake of gathering information and becoming known.

I have tried to strategize this in my current role. Then the company was bought and everything stalled out. I still have an opportunity to position myself differently, but my attitude has changed. I am no longer willing to invest a lot of time and effort into something that isn’t going to be seen or create the kind of impact I want. My focus has shifted internally to my own situation outside of work and now I am just collecting a paycheck.

I won’t be in this attitude forever, but for now it has to happen. I have to get over the hump of quitting smoking and restructuring my routine toward healthier goals. I don’t have the bandwidth to do a bunch of extra work for no pay and no guarantee the new leadership will even give a shit. Right now I am coasting in the uncertainty of this new company even making an effort to retain old staff.

The likelihood of this new ownership stripping out the technology and eliminating the personnel overhead is not zero. This is especially true when one of the biggest reasons they bought the company was for the office overseas.

Anyone who has worked in tech long enough knows exactly what the means.

I wouldn’t blame them. If I was CEO, this is exactly what I would do. According the communications, there is a 24 month runway before all remote folks need to be in an office. My suspicion is they are going to use that 24 months to integrate the tech, retain the key knowledge, eliminate the overhead and offshore as much as possible.

If I am honest with myself I do not feel secure. Definitely not secure enough to overextend myself. I am trying to remain hopeful for the future, but I certainly don’t have an emotional attachment to the work, and I certainly don’t feel irreplaceable. For now I am going to let things simmer until after the first of the year. I will keep my eyes open for an internal move, but I am not working any harder then I need to.

Meanwhile I am fucking broke, and I need to do something. In the past I have picked up side gigs, and have been successful despite it landing me in the emergency room once. Nothing major, I just drank too much coffee and ending up having an episode I thought might be a heart attack. It ended up being premature ventricular contractions which sounds like something you shouldn’t have, but it was fine.

Totally fine.

One of the most distressing things when I was unemployed, aside from not being able to find a position in my professional vein, is I couldn’t even get a job stocking shelves at the grocery store. When you are being denied jobs you are heavily overqualified for it starts to make you feel worthless. I mean, I was initially holding out for a position making 100K a year and I couldn’t even land a job making minimum wage.

I likely could have gotten something at a fast food joint or doing gig work, but I wasn’t about to put miles on my Jeep to bring people their Taco Bell. When I finally got the job I have though, I was very near a level of desperation that I would have taken any job I could land. I want to say the pandemic had a lot to do with the situation, but I don’t know. I am not confident I could get a side gig that will complement my current work schedule today.

The other option is to jump back on the job hunt train and try to find something closer to 65-75K a year. This would be the ideal scenario but the economy isn’t exactly handing those jobs out to 50 year old straight white males with only a high school education and no certifications or portfolio. In order to compete with those applicants I am going to either have to know someone, or lie hard on the resume, and I abhor lying.

Plus have you tried looking for a job recently?

So not fine.

On the flip side, it isn’t a tremendous investment to throw bait out there every once in a while. At the very least I should probably update my resume and spend a little time every now and again looking at the market. I could just take my chances at applying to 3-5 jobs a week.

The real question I need to contend with is how do I find a vocation? How to I discover what it is that really calls to both my skills and my passion? How do I get someone to give me money for something I can’t wait to get up in the morning and do? What I love to do is talk shit, but whenever I enter “professional shit talker” into the search field it always yields 0 results.

It is the same result for “eccentric billionaire”.

I love to write, and I have been told I have a way with words, so that has been the dream off and on through the years. The problem is, I only like to write what I like to write, so finding a job as a writer likely isn’t in the cards. Especially being a writer than can bring in 100K a year. That would take a miracle.

Instead I am going to have to continue down the same career path I have been on and somehow find an organization that I can get behind. I applied at the Olympic Training Center because I do loves me some Olympics, but they decided to go another way. I should check in with them again to see what they have going on.

I could do something to support animals or children, but there isn’t a lot of tech in those spaces. Cars would be cool, and music would be amazing, but I have a feeling those industries are very niche and in high demand. Anything in the creative arts would be dope, but again. I am not sure there is much room in any of those genres for a shit talking tech nerd. At least not at the salary demands I have.

Fuck.

I really don’t know what I want to do, and worse I don’t even know where to begin to get there. The only thing I know is, the easiest road to a 100K salary is a path I really don’t want to take. I don’t want to move to Denver, I don’t want to be another cog in the machine, and I don’t want to have to clutter my brain with a bunch of bullshit AI is going to end up taking over before I retire.

It’s no wonder I can’t sleep.