Oddball Update

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

Alas, it seems I’ve left you all hanging. Again. Seems like just yesterday I was on here saying that “tomorrow or shortly thereafter” I’d be posting about some great, mystical revelation I’d had, but of course, a thundering silence was the sole result. I doubt I need tell you that work was the reason for last week’s hiatus. On the upside, it may have been the last work-related hiatus this site will see for a while.

Last time, I posted about getting neck-deep in the shit as soon as I got back home, quickly returning to my round-the-clock schedule of jobs, side jobs, friendly jobs, favor jobs, and hey-whatever jobs. I won’t get into the details, but I was also starting to get involved in a huge project for a guy who recently quit my day job under acrimonious circumstances. As this guy and the honchos at my day job started to get into a royal pissing match with each other, I found myself caught in the middle. Some real questions were raised, some concerns were brought up, and I didn’t know if I could even believe any of it — being that everything spoken by either side was shrouded in their own agendas.

In the end, I decided I’d had enough of this kind of crap. It looked like all of these various masters to whom I was answering would have me working 24/7 for the rest of my life if I would allow it, so I figured it was time to stop allowing it. And it’s here that I must thank my boss and mentor-type figure for giving me a real look inside the company for which I work on a daily basis, giving me a dose of unvarnished truth and allowing me to form my own evaluations.

In the end, I decided it was time to put a stop to all of the side work I usually busy myself with. I will no longer accept anything — clients or tasks — from anyone other than the company with which I’m employed, period. Once I got a peek into the inner workings of said company, I learned that there were all kinds of things we could do that we simply didn’t have the resources to accomplish. Why split myself in two, three or even four pieces, serving multiple masters, when I could earn my extra cash by going beyond the call for my employer? It was such an obvious solution, I felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.

I suppose the revelation came as I found myself doing the sort of work for my side clients that I hate doing — tech support, bugfixing, e-commerce, that sort of crap. I’m a design guy, first and foremost. While I can do that other stuff, including some limited programming, project planning and support, I don’t like it. I want to design great things, put them together and then have someone else take point on supporting it. At my day job, I can do that — both during my regular 40 hours, and any extra time I might put in. It’s a win/win situation — I do the work I like to do and get paid for it, and my company gets to venture down new avenues, try new product ideas and be even more competitive. Why didn’t I think of this before?

This isn’t to say I’ll be working at the same frenzied pace, just for one client instead of four. My boss is of a similar mindset about balancing work time and free time, so I’m going to start by reclaiming my evenings and weekends. As new projects and opportunities arise, I’ll put in extra time as I see fit, and as the need arises. Like this past weekend, where I worked ’till midnight for two days in a row — on day job stuff. As a result, we deployed a new version of our top-selling product on schedule, along with a huge array of support materials to help clients work with it. That’s the kind of stuff that deserves my time — not pissing away hours trying to squash bugs on a poorly-written canned e-commerce platform or some such thing.

I’m also particularly proud of the fact that I managed to refuse to work for that guy I mentioned before — the one who quit his job at our company last month in a particularly messy fashion — without pissing off either party. They may still be at each other’s throats, but there’s no reason to make an enemy out of either of them.

So, I thought I’d post this entry as a sort of signpost on my continuing road into the unknown, indicating the point at which I stopped being such a knucklehead and got serious about my work life. Hopefully, in the future, there will be far fewer posts about work (rant-type posts, anyway), and a lot more about stuff that really matters to me.

Tagged as Work + Categorized as Life