Back From The Dead, Pt. 2

Here's part two of the below post.

This is really a sequel to the below post, as it provides an update to where I've been and what's been going through my head.  I've been told that this is an important thing for some people to recognize in their own journey of faith - it's more common than I thought at the time I was writing it and, contrary to my initial scepticism about it's tone, it was not initially received by all as whiney and self-indulgent.

Enjoy.

Change, but for who's sake? or "Why whatever it is I'm waiting for has to happen soon or I'm gonna go broke"

Someone told me the other day that they "love change." I found myself scoffing at that because, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I hate it. Like, "hate-it-with-the-passion-of-a-thousand-fiery-suns" hate it. I could name a bunch of reasons why, and my inner voice constantly screams them all, and more.

"What's the point?"

"Just let me live my life."

"Leave me the hell alone, assholes!"

"Go away, I'm not hurting anyone!"

"Change is scary."

"I don't know if I can do it on my own."

"Additional generic loner cliche…!"

Despite all that, I'm willing. God knows I'm willing. No, seriously, I've told Him. Having a willingness, however, means nothing without the direction to see it through, and that's something I have a critical shortage of right now. So, in a state of perpetual confusion, I keep asking myself, "if you can't have one without the other, why have I only been given one half of an equation to solve?"

The truth is, I've lived a large part of my adult life without any direction. I graduated high school and started working right away. The only reason I went to university at all was because I was bored with my job. I wouldn't have started work at Bell without outside help. And since I was laid off, I haven't had any desire to do anything worthwhile. Why? Because I could care less. I've just always gone with whatever's been put in front of me, because it's there, so why not?

In March of 2009 I was laid off. In January 2010, I got a job with a contractor. In May of the same year, I quit. Why? The reason now sounds, quite frankly, dumb and naive, and I've been rethinking it.

Don't get me wrong - the job I left was not for me. I saw a TV commercial today that featured a cell phone with the same email ringtone that I had on my work phone and, I swear to God, when I heard it, it sent me into an acid flashback. I seriously freaked out. I thought there was some late-night emergency and I was going to have to spend the rest of the night driving all around the province and listening to all the reasons why my client thinks I'm doing the job wrong. Needless to say, for a job I was only at for four months that I left three months ago, that's a pretty serious reaction, so I'm not regretting it for one second.

I quit because I felt like I wasn't being obedient in it. Like it wasn't what God wanted for me. Usually I'm the type of guy who toughs it out and just lives in misery until it either changes or doesn't, but in this instance, I felt very strongly that I had to leave it behind and open myself up to something better. So I gave notice, and haven't looked back since.

But in the intervening months, nothing has happened. I have had absolutely no drive to do anything, and I haven't done much beyond sitting on the couch. Waiting. Right back where I started. Yes, you're probably saying "so get a job and then work it out, idiot!", but who's to say that's not going to put me in the same place I was back in January? In my case, I guess having only one half of an equation adds up to paralysing indecision.

So ya, I've been rethinking my motivations behind leaving my job. Was I naive to think that I'm so special that God wants more from me than just work? I'm not under any delusions that I'm going to change the world, but to know something - anything - would be a big step forward. To have something to work towards would be better. Just what the hell am I waiting for, anyway? Because I could just as easily sit here until I rot; it's not like I have a wife and kids depending on me or anything else worthwhile going on. Except that's not really true. Not the "wife and kids" part, of course, but the "sit here and rot" part. No, the truth is, despite whatever reasonable, calm, easy-going exterior I present (relative, I know, keep your comments to yourself), inside I'm so utterly sick of my life that if something fundamental doesn't happen soon, I'm going to pop. Like a zit. Pretty picture.

I feel like people are reading this and shaking their heads because the answer is so simple, so why don't I get it? Like, duh, right? Or on the other side of things, "get over yourself. You're not that important." Well, the longer I sit here with nothing to do but stew in my own thought processes, the more likely it is I'm going to agree with both sentiments, give up on the whole thing and go back to where I was before. Is it wrong to give God an ultimatum? Is it a sin to tell Him to shit or get off the pot?

Change? I hate it. Hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. But seeing as I've been backed into a corner, it's kind of become a necessary evil. So come on already. Let's get it over with.

I swear though, if this all turns out to be for nothing, I'm gonna be pissed.

Back From The Dead

It's been over a year since I did anything with this blog.  My writing frequency tends to be sporadic, so a lot of times I won't have anything to write, and then I'll just start gabbing.

I'm going to share a couple of things that I've written over the last year or so.  They're both spaced quite a ways apart (one was written in April of 2009 and one was written in August of 2010), but they both speak of the journey that I've been on since I was laid off in March of 2009.  I've copied them both into separate posts so as not to make one huge post.

The first one was written a few weeks after I got laid off.  I had made a decision to take a step back and take stock of where my life is.  Here's the full text of what I wrote.  If you're friends with me on Facebook, you've likely already read this post.

Unsupervised Boredom

Unsupervised boredom can be an interesting thing. It's been happening more and more often in the past few weeks; I can imagine that most people reading this would know why. My continuing bout of unemployment has given me a chance to contemplate where I am, and should be, in my (relatively short) professional career, as well as where it all fits with the rest of my life.

At least that's what I'd like to be doing. Ideally, I'd like to sit back and contemplate, but more often than not I just find myself becoming more and more disillusioned and overly critical of what I see around me, hence (maybe?) the lack of said motivation. Then I'm in a bad mood, pretty soon I'm just bitching for it's own sake and in the end I've completely lost track of what I set out to do here.

Hmm. Maybe I'll just get it all off my chest now and save room for more philosophical ramblings further down. Ok, here goes. WTF is up with:

• Watching Beyonce lower herself to playing with a Nintendo DSi for the sake of a paycheck. The disparity between the two (glamorous Beyonce vs. nerdy Nintendo), makes me wonder just how big the paycheck was.
• Continually seeing the abysmal state of spelling and grammar being displayed by people who (inexplicably) consider themselves "professionals." Sometimes it makes me want to cry.
• Christians who watch "The Golden Compass" and think that it somehow has the power to rob them of their faith just because the author of the source material is an admitted atheist. It's a movie folks. If your faith is that shaken by a movie, maybe you should sit down and take a closer look at it.
• I can't wait for the new Star Trek movie to come out, but can't help but laugh (on the outside) at the fans who judge it as worthless before they even see it because their (obviously superior) ideas on how it should have been done were not considered. William Shatner. SNL. 1986. Look it up.
• I can't abide self pity. At all. Pick yourself up and get on with your life. Or don't, I don't care. I'm not here to listen to your moaning about how life isn't fair, or how nobody gets you, or anything else that adds up to so much boo-hooing.

Right, that's enough of that.

So what does one think about when they're unemployed and can't muster up the motivation to look for a job? Well, questions of self-worth are definitely close to the top, but I'm not going to turn this into a pity party, especially after what I said above. Beyond that, it's allowed me to take stock of my life up until this point. The most pressing issue that comes to mind is whether or not it's worth continuing.

No, I'm not talking about "ending it all." Geez people! I'm talking about whether or not a change of direction is in order. I look around at my apartment and see the the fruits of the last few years of work. I see a TV with 100+ channels, game systems, DVDs, a nice computer with Internet access, drums, a nice car, a clean apartment, and no roommate. On the surface, it's the perfect picture of self-reliance, but if you peel back a few layers (and not even that many layers, just a few is enough), you'll see that all it serves to do is turn me into a hermit. I've spent so much time building this self-contained little box to exist in that I haven't even considered poking my head out once in a while to see who might want to come in and see what all the fuss is about. And no, I'm not trying to be pitying (after my rant above, you can bet I'm going to be very careful to cover my tracks wherever I can), but it's true. The funniest part is, it's not even that much stuff. It's not like I've spent all this time building a legacy that will live for generations after me - it's just a friggin' TV.

Don't get me wrong, I have friends. Good ones too. It's just that I'm usually the one sharing in their life; it's not traditionally been the other way around. If that makes sense. And I'm not blaming anyone, or pointing fingers either.

My chosen profession is not exciting. It's telecom. In recent months before I was laid off, I was becoming more and more bored with it all. It was all the same. Even if I was to move to a different sector of operations, it would still all be the same. I sit at a desk, stare at a computer screen, and try to figure out why some stupid T1 wasn't behaving like it should. Even though I could see upward mobility in the company, the fundamentals of what I was doing now would always be the same, and it was the fundamentals that I was bored with. So why should I be in such a rush to find a new job so soon?

The challenge of it all? I don't get satisfaction from a challenge. I get frustrated. I get satisfaction from completing a task. It's the destination, not the journey. Fix this broken T1? Sure, but the warm-and-fuzzies when I fix it don't come from how challenging the repair was, they come from finishing the repair. This is what technology has become to me - a means to an end. A paycheck to continue building my little self-contained box. So why should I be in such a rush to find a new job so soon?

That's what I love about going to church. I play drums there. Being a musician is so different than working telecom that having both during the week was enough to stave off an eventual burnout. Being able to contribute in such a meaningful way to a cause like worship is awesome and remarkably humbling. And yes (before the coming flood of drummer jokes starts), I am a musician. My influences can be seen in a few different places, but primarily it comes from a desire to use the drums as a musical instrument, not just a "noisy timekeeper", a philosophy echoed by perhaps my favorite drummer of all time, Ted Kirkpatrick. I want to ebb and flow with the rest of the team, to compliment them in what I bring, and also to be complimented by what they bring. I don't want to go there, bang away on the skins until I can barely lift my arms, try my best to look as cool as I can, and then go home. I can come away from a set feeling like I completely blew it (like this morning), and still feel like my presence there was worthwhile. I can't say that about work; not even a little bit. If I feel like I've blown it at work, I usually find myself sitting at home at the end of the day wanting to quit.

So here I sit, with two completely different lives. On the one hand, I have a career that sees me sitting in an office five days a week staring at a computer screen, collecting a paycheck, alone and lonely, with very little chance of an "emotional" future, it seems. On the other hand, I make meaningful contributions to a cause greater than myself that sees influence all across this province, and I have fun while I do it. The biggest difference? It's the journey, not the destination.

So tell me again - why should I be in such a rush to find a new job so soon? Seriously.

Part two is above. 

sometimes you just gotta. even when you don't wanna.

Old-School Dave-Blog #3 - Random 2AM Ramblings

Seeing as it's almost 2AM, I thought I'd let you all have a peak at my life when I was on shift at Bell. As you can see, I wasn't a big fan of it, so I felt that I had to do something about it. At the end of the post, it mentions that I'm "looking at possibilities," which at the time consisted of finding a new job. I guess the only possibility I could see for myself was that if I didn't like what I was doing, I had to do something else. Only later did I find that it is possible to change what I already have instead of just writing it off as a lost cause.

Sometime during that period, I was struggling with a lot of bad repair work that was coming my way. My job was to take broken data circuits, diagnose the fault and direct the repair on behalf of the customer, and a lot of the tickets I was getting from the help desk for a certain type of circuit were almost consistently wrong - not a provider issue, not a broken circuit issue, etc. It got to the point that I was bitching so loudly that my boss got sick of it, took me aside and told me that if I don't like something that the help desk is doing wrong, then fix it. So I did. I took them all in groups and taught classes on how these particular circuits work, where Bell's responsibility lies, and where our own individual departments come in to fix them. Within a week, my ticket load had dropped by 20%.

I wrote the below post before this incident took place, at the time where I was thinking that the only way to deal with my scheduling problem was to find a new job. Once I started to understand that fixing my problems instead of ignoring them was a much better tactic, I started thinking of ways to get around not having a social life because of my job. To that end, I vowed to get myself promoted to a position that allowed for a steady 8-4, Monday-to-Friday workload, even to the point of putting it into my OPR as a goal to accomplish. Within two months, I was the Team Lead. Don't ever say a little hard work now doesn't pay off later.

Enjoy.

Friday, April 20th, 2007, 2:21AM:

So, I'm working this morning. Yup, a graveyard shift. They suck, mostly because there's nothing to do. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm keeping myself occupied (at last count, I'm watching "The Shawshank Redemption", tooling around on Facebook, scratching out this blog entry, testing a T1 for Bell Mobility and waiting on Telus to give me some test results for a PRI), but even though that sounds like a lot, it's really not and it doesn't leave me with much on the go. I have my iPod, so I can listen to music, but no one's calling me for anything, no tickets are showing up in my queue. There's really not a lot of "test centre" things to be done.

That's what I do now, by the way. I work in a network test centre. I take data circuits (mainly T1's, but some 10/100Mbit and fractional T1's) for customers and troubleshoot them if there's a problem, trying to find faults in the physical continuity of the cable.

Anyway, back to this. What sucks about being on a midnight shift is that I'm the only one here. There's not enough to do to justify having two people on, so there's only one. And it gets quite lonely.

Doesn't make for much of a social life either, and that's the worst part. I'd love to be able to say that the company I work for recognizes I have a life outside of work, but I can't. Not in my experience. Because of this stupid shift work I can't make plans based on any kind of consistent schedule, I have to make sure that all my plans revolve around whatever shift I may be working on any given day, and I'm not able to do the things that my friends are doing on their days off because I'm usually working.

For example, this weekend, my roommates and friends are going out to a cabin to celebrate a birthday. I would have loved to go, but I'm working. Yup, I'm working three graveyards in a row and tonight's the first one. I won't be off until Sunday morning.

I have to find a new job.

So, yet again, I'm not able to make myself available for a social occasion because of my job. I hate that. I'm not the most social person to begin with, and this isn't the best way to change that.

Whatever. I'm looking at possibilities. We'll see what happens.

death and perspective

Pray for his family. Everything else has already been said.

Old-School Dave-Blog #2 - Ok, maybe I should explain

For my next entry, I'm going to regale you all with a story from when I was roommates with Tyler. I guess the entry explains it all, but it was pretty funny at the time. Hope it still is.

Saturday, November 19th, 2005, 10:22PM:

I got into work yesterday morning and was just starting my day when I got a call. It was my roommate.

"Did you see my car this morning?!?"

"No."

"For f**k's sake. Somebody stole my car."

Now, you gotta understand the history this car has. When my roommate turned 16, his dad promised to restore him a car. Nine and a half years later, he finally delivers. A month later, I get the above phone call. And all this time, this car has had the crap hyped out of it. I mean, there's been so much publicity on this car that you'd think it was the second coming of Christ. Well, if Christ were a '78 Monte Carlo at least...

Anyway, I told him to call the impound lot before freaking out, just in case it got towed for whatever reason. Turns out it actually was stolen and he had to call the cops. So I promised I'd buy a bottle of something on the way home and then got on with my day.

After I got home and we got into the bottle (hence my grammatical difficulties below), we watched some more episodes of Scrubs and toasted the radmobile. A little while later when we were good and toasted and Tyler had gone upstairs to pass out, we got a call from the police.

It seems the radmobile was involved in a high-speed chase with the cops. They didn't say what the people in the car were on their way to do, but what they did find in their possessions were four bellaclavas and a handgun.

Apparently there wasn't a whole lot of damage to the car, but the police wanted to keep it for a bit while they CSI-ify it. After that, the insurance company wants to get their grubby little mitts on it while they assess the damage before cutting Tyler a check.

Stay tuned...

Old-School Dave-Blog #1 - Operational Performance

For the next little while, I'm going to be looking back at an old blog I used to write and publishing a few select posts from it here. This one in particular, about my first review when I worked for Bell, illustrates a few things about where I'm at now in my career/life. It's interesting to look back a few years and see a lot of the same issues, and how it relates to what I'm doing to change some things. Enjoy!

Thursday, November 24th, 2005, 9:48PM:

I hate review time at work. Since this is my first one at this particular company, I got to see whether or not the past six months have been worth my while. I guess it went ok.

The shit-kicker is, my boss has left the company. Today was actually his last day, and one of the things he wanted to get out of the way before he left was the reviews for the whole team. He wasn't really doing the whole review though, he was just prepping the person who was going to take over for him. Kind of like a mid-year review, even though it's the end of November. So I go into this meeting with him, flush from running back and forth from the printer for the last half-hour (all first thing in the morning, mind you), carrying an armload of paper 3/4 of an inch thick thinking I have to prove to him, with hard copies, that I'm a good hard-working employee and he shouldn't have any reason to doubt that.

So after all that, after sweating bullets all night and all morning, after the months of agonizing self-doubt thinking that I'm nothing more than a hack and I'm not going to prove anything to him and he should just fire me and get it over with - AFTER ALL THAT - he only looks at one document. Not only that, but we spend more than half-an-hour talking about all the things I have to get done before the end of the year to properly meet my performance objectives. Because in another three weeks, I'm going to have to do this all over again before my reputation will be finalized.

See, I didn't get this job the old fashion way - well, maybe I did in this day and age - but I didn't just apply and rely on my natural charm and expertise to beat out hundreds of other applicants and wow the shit out of my boss. No, my dad set this interview up for me. At the time, he was VP of Operations at this company, so I was a bit of a shoe-in.

So all the time that I've been here, there's been this nagging thought running through the back of my mind: "Do I really belong here? Would I have been able to get this job without my dad's assistance? Or are they all just humoring him by letting me play IT monkey for a little while? I should just get out of this industry altogether." Well, today I was going to find out, one way or another. I wanted to ask them for some real feedback - not just a cursory pat on the back and a thumbs up with fingers crossed behind their back. I guess I really didn't have to, because as I was listening to my boss discuss with me how I was doing on some of the more obscurely-worded points of my OPR, I realized that maybe I'm not doing so bad after all. At one point, my boss even said he was "pleasantly surprised" at how I just kind of hit the ground running.

Understand, when I talk about the people at the company humoring dad by letting me play IT monkey for a little while, I wasn't serious. Nor do I really think that's what's going on; rather I've just been so wracked with self-doubt over the last few months that I've almost convinced myself it's the truth.

Maybe that means it's time to strike out on my own. Hmm...