General

A brief essay on how my broken logic mired me in the wrong job for years

Read and learn from my logical error.

Many years ago I thought about what sort of career I’d like to have, instead of just bouncing from job to job and/or relying on networking to essentially do the same.

I thought about what I liked to do and what I was good at and where they might intersect, taking the approach as a self-designed “What color is my parachute?” thing.

What did I like? Tech! I’ve always had a geeky interest in tech, whether it was video games, digital watches (hey, back in the olden times they really did seem cool) or other gadgets.

What was I good at? I was always into making things, so I was pretty much a creative person. My childhood and teen years are filled with sketches, comics, short stories and an incomplete balsa wood roller coaster. Being creative wasn’t just something I enjoyed, it pretty much defined who I was.

But I ignored this.

Instead, I came up with the answer of “I enjoy helping or teaching others.” This is true enough, and it seemed a more practical thing to try to turn into a career. By combining these two things I was set!

  • I enjoy tech
  • I enjoy helping people

=

  • A career in tech support!

The problem is tech support doesn’t require being creative at all. Sure, someone may tell you that you need to be creative to find solutions, but that’s just playing semantics. The actual skills required aren’t anything close to what you use for drawing or writing or acting. It’s all about research, organization and puzzle-solving. While I enjoy those things, they aren’t the same, but I went ahead into tech support anyway, because logically it just had to work!

And it did, in a way, for a while. But the reality is that tier 1 or even tier 2 tech support is pretty basic stuff. Depending on how well-designed the systems you work with are, you can find yourself doing a lot of very repetitive stuff, like resetting passwords, re-enabling 2FA access or things like that. These are menial tasks, and ultimately they came to bore me. And then I burnt out. I felt very much like the guy in the motivational poster in Futurama:

I faced the horror of having most of my job experience being in tech support, and how was I supposed to get out from that? It turned out that the best way was to make a clean break entirely, at least for now. I had to accept that I had made a critical error in assuming that enjoying tech + helping people = a great career.

I’ll never work as a tier1/2 tech support person again. I’ve done that enough to have wrung out everything I can get from it. And after realizing my fatal flaw in combining what I liked with what I felt I was good at, I’m now asking myself, “What do I enjoy doing and how can I build a career around that?”

More on this soon™.

The Great No Soda Experiment

It’s actually more modest than great.

The plan is, starting tomorrow, to not drink any soda for the next week and see what happens. What will I drink instead? Here’s a list:

  • Goat blood
  • Motor oil
  • Liquid soap
  • Molten lava

No, wait, that’s the list of what I won’t be drinking. Here’s the actual list:

  • Water
  • Chocolate milk (after a run)
  • Tea

I am curious to see if anything at all noticeable happens. And if I can resist the siren song of that delicious1For relative values of “delicious” diet soda.

I will report back in one week with the results, possibly presented in chart form or as some kind of multimedia extravaganza.

Big enough to be big, small enough to be small

There, I just gave you the secret advice recipe of probably a billion people on the internet, which is:

  • Be [this kind of thing]
  • But also be [the opposite of the above]

So you get things like:

  • Learn to be patient/Never wait too long
  • Take action without deliberation/Think carefully before acting
  • Go for red!/Go for blue!
  • Up is down/Down is up

Thank you and subscribe to my newsletter.

–James, Clear

Why am I listening to The Go-Go’s so much?

I don’t know, but I am, and I’m not sorry!

I recently grabbed their third album, Talk Show, which I never got back on its original release in 1984. Sorry, Go-Go’s, I’m one of those people who helped contribute to the album’s relative unpopularity. I enjoyed the (hit) single “Head Over Heels” but for whatever reason the album as a whole didn’t appeal to me. I think the cover actually was a negative. Not only is it incredibly 80s (which offers a certain amount of kitsch value now), but it demonstrates a serious lack of imagination–unlike the album, which is actually their most sophisticated. Let’s compare covers:

  • Beauty and the Beat: Not only is the title great all on its own, the cover features the band members pseudo-anonymously dressed in towels with beauty cream covering their faces. It’s fun and clever.
  • Vacation: This one looks like a postcard from the 1950s, with retro typefaces and colors, and the band water skiing in formation in puffy pink and white outfits. Once again, it conveys a tremendous sense of fun.
  • Talk Show: This one is simply the five members of the band all photographed straight-on, the photos cropped and lined up to span the cover. There’s a multicolor border. That’s it. Even leaving aside the fabulous 80s hair and fashions, this cover is just boring. It also turned out to be prescient, because it was the first cover to not actually have all the band members posing together, hinting at the split to come after the album was released. Also, I still don’t know what the asterisk after the words “talk show” refer to.

There’s only one more studio album to go, 2001’s God Bless The Go-Go’s, which is allegedly a fine but not outstanding addition to their sun-dappled oeuvre. This means I’ll soon probably put these albums aside for a while. For now, though, I got the beat.

A new chapter in my book begins

Hey hey I guess it hasn’t hit me yet
—Blue Rodeo

The book that is my life, that is.

Yesterday (Friday the 13th–dun dun dun) was the last day of work at the place I’ve been working since November 2012. I chose to leave to start doing my own thing, to be my own boss, set my own schedule, meet my own goals.

It’s a leap into the unknown, and I know I could fall on my face.

But it’s also exciting, and I’m looking forward to taking on challenges I’ve set for myself.

First, though, two weeks of vacation. Woo!

More to come…

A case of the blahs

Hard to explain. Could it be…

  • Uncertainty about the future
  • Global warming (sort of related to the above)
  • General sense of flabbiness
  • Something intangible and unknowable
  • The fact that the Styx album Kilroy Was Here really got made

I’m listening to “Mr. Roboto” right now, and I’m leaning toward the last one. I loved this album when it came out in 1983. I was 19 years old at the time. I present this as my only defense. Well, that and being a sucker for concept albums, apparently even bad ones.

July 2021 was hot

See title. July saw no measurable precipitation, started with record-breaking temperatures in the 40s and is ending with temperatures in the 30s (for reference, today’s average high is normally 25C, though 30C doesn’t seem as hot anymore after experiencing what 42C feels like).

I know talking about the weather seems kind of dull, but it really has been remarkable. Up to mid-June people were still making “Juneuary” jokes. Now the bush outside the office window is withered and sad in a way it’s never been before, but still green, for the time being.

Wildfire smoke is expected to roll in today, and indeed it looks cloudy out. With a province-wide fire ban in effect, we get quotes like these from this CBC News story on enforcement of the ban because people gonna people:

Hunter said there have been instances in the South Coast region where they have discovered campfires within metres of campfire ban signs in provincial parks. 

I’m going out to take photos today, so I don’t necessarily want it to rain today, but I wouldn’t object to some nice showers overnight. I love summer (unlike a lot of people), but it’s making it tough to love this year.

The state of wearing masks and the pandemic, late July 2021

Sometimes I’ll read an article that nearly perfectly matches what I’m thinking, and this Atlantic article on wearing masks is one of them. It’s free to read, as is all of their COVID-19 coverage, so the link below should keep working. And yes, I did feel a bit weird reading at the end that the free coverage is in part due to sponsorship from the Chan Zuckerberg (re: Facebook) Initiative.

Case numbers in BC have doubled over the last two weeks, and are back into daily triple-digit territory. For me, it’s really simple, with Reason #1 being dominant–I don’t want to catch COVID-19. We simply don’t know enough about long term effects for me to be comfortable lowering my risk for the (admittedly welcome, but ultimately minor) benefit of going mask-free in public indoor spaces, especially transit.

4 Reasons I’m Wearing a Mask Again by Katherine Wu, The Atlantic