Work and Accountability

My allergies and eczema make a bad employee. I have too many food allergies to eat at, let alone work in the majority of restaurants. Since I'm allergic to cats and dogs another large swath of jobs are inaccessible to me due to the rise in pet-friendly offices. That leaves remote work and little else. Of those, I have not yet found or been in consideration for any job that will accommodate my health issues.

I have worked in tech on and off since graduating art school in the late 2000s. I've worked in small shops that made bespoke business websites, medium-sized companies that burned me out with tech-bro culture, and for individuals who sincerely believed that they could be the next tech startup worth millions of dollars if they could convince a couple of desperate programmers to work for as close to minimum wage as possible. An existential crisis I had about making a living enabling wealthy people to get richer by selling products destined to be future ocean microplastics lead me to the grave mistake of attending university to study engineering and environmental science.

I say "mistake" because the stress of school and a part time programming job triggered my latent chronic illnesses and financially reset me to zero. Instead of graduating with a useful electrical engineering degree, I left school with a bill for surgery that was essentially every penny I had minus one and eczema severe enough to hospitalize me several times. This lead to long term insomnia that I am still dealing with today.

Sometimes I get a solid six hours of sleep, but most of the time a bone-deep itch wakes me up to the sleep deprived reality of bloody sheets and piles of shed skin. When that happens, as it does most nights, it makes waking up when my alarm goes off a gamble. Even if I do manage to wake up in time, I find it hard to focus on the technical tasks essential to working in tech.

I live in a nearly constant state of itch because escaping food and environmental allergies is like trying to live on a planet that has the wrong atmosphere for my biology. This is the root of the sleep problems I face that makes me a bad employee. Unfortunately as an American none of this is an excuse for not working. In 2019, fresh out of a three day hospital stay for a skin infection caused by working a construction job that made me sweaty and uncontrollably itchy, a disability judge told me to go work in an Amazon warehouse if my sleep deprived mind can't handle office work. Essentially I was told my options were work and die, or don't work and die. Since then I've been an unemployed burden.

I've used Linux exclusively since 2012 on second-hand hardware, so I've accidentally learned a bit about Linux administration, laptop repair, and making useful things out of other people's garbage. I think it's dishonest to list every single programming language, framework, and library I've used over the years because I can't even remember enough Haskell to modify the XMonad desktop I've used for over almost a decade, nor could I coherently discuss any of the rube goldberg javascript and tag soup frameworks I've been forced to learn about. With a few days of study, I can get back up to speed with Bash, Python, or C.

I can edit images, audio, video (with better hardware), and I am comfortable with artistic performance thanks to my experience playing music in public for tips. I can do basic carpentry, pour concrete, and implement ideas for construction or remodeling projects. I can cook a wide range of veganized foods and baked goods as long as I can work in a kitchen without any of the dozen or so food allergies present. I can offer guidance for projects that involve open source software, permaculture, sustainable agriculture, design of plastic-free products, carbon negative business ideas, and film production. I can teach beginning programming or guitar.

If you're ok with me showing up for work in the afternoon because I spent the night scratching then I'm probably a good fit for your team. I have a wide breadth of knowledge, experience, and interests. I can code, but being tired all the time makes it a slow process. I've built a tool for automating around my cognitive shortcomings that I have used daily since its inception.

To be clear, I don't have a burning passion for code, launching apps, or pursuing market share. The dirty secret is that most of the people who say they do quietly confide in people like me that they don't either, but it's illusion they're willing to sell if it keeps them housed, fed, and gives them access to healthcare. If the job involves making the world a better place I’d be excited to work everyday, but in most cases a job is a job. I will do my job to the best of my ability, but I will not pretend tasks like keeping Twitter running or maximizing watch time for Youtube advertisements is anything beyond a task to keep us busy while serious problems are ignored by the people paying the salaries. I’d like to work 20 hours a week or less because most of my adulthood has been spent in hellish medical poverty and I’d like to enjoy some of my time on earth before I die.

If I could design my perfect work week, I'd contribute to Free Software projects, farm Azolla in unused water bodies (reservoirs, artificial ponds, etc), and get back into making music. There is a surprising amount of overlap between these. A lot of open source audio productions software needs contributors and maintainers. Growing Azolla for carbon sequestration could benefit from marketing and environmental analysis to convince communities to pursue it. Being a working musician (with an anonymizing, air filtering helmet) would allow me to participate socially and creatively in the world which would allow me to handle the other two thirds of my work without burnout. I will write about the specifics of these tasks in a future post.

The reality of living work-or-die survival mode has made me a bad worker. Not just for bosses, but myself. I need the structure of deadlines but I can't deal with the sort of artificial pressure that lead to burn out and chronic illness. I need to be able to say my current estimate is n days but it may become n + 1 days if I have a day stolen by health problems without being treated like taking care of my health is an unreasonable demand.

I think I would thrive with crowd funded work that many creatives do but that has proven hard to build organically. I’m in the strange position of relying on pharmaceuticals to keep my immune system to suppressed that cost thousands of dollars without insurance. The blue state “for poor people” insurance that I depend on vanishes if I earn “too much” money, but what they consider too much isn’t enough to afford those medications or treatments out of pocket without living in poverty again. It’s not an appealing proposition to work full time and still make zero socioeconimc progress.

Can I escape this? A year ago I’d have said probably not. Today I am in situation (which I will discuss more in the future) that makes me more optimistic.