@asdf said in Work WTF:
@tufty said in Work WTF:
despite being a highly qualified IT wonk with 20+ years experience, I work as a mechanic and chairlift driver in a ski resort.
Out of curiosity: How did that happen?
My imagination tells me that at some point you got fed up with IT and thought "Fuck it, I'm gonna be a stripper!". You then quit your job, had to realize you were too old to become a stripper and searched for a different job you might actually enjoy. Am I close?
Kinda. Long story.
I fell into IT because it was the easiest thing, paid well, and the problem solving aspect was basically like doing crosswords all day. Plus it got me out of flatville, east angular.
A good few years, one chronic depression, a failed marriage (the last two items might not be entirely unrelated) and a fair bit of water under the bridge later, I'd come to the conclusion that, far from making the world a better place, removing paper from the workplace, etc, IT largely makes the world a worse place. Bad technology, worse practices and unbelievably optimistic expectations mean that every new system is almost guaranteed to be worse than the last. Systems to make work for systems engineers. Hell, at least I was being paid well.
Meanwhile, I'd always liked France. Good food, wine, coffee, varied landscape, what's not to like. And I kinda "spoke" french. By chance, I met this lovely French girl in a crappy spanish bar off Kensington High Street. She subsequently became my second wife.
Slowly, the allure of London was wearing thin. Sure, I could walk to work, but living over the road from the "Blue Note" nightclub was getting hard work, and with a girlfriend it was harder to justify getting up at 3am and staggering across the road for a pint because the bastards had just woken you up by emptying the bottle bin into a skip from the second floor window again. So we were figuring "what the hell, why not move to France, at least part time". The idea being to take my contracting lucre, along with some money my girlfriend had inherited, go buy a hovel in the Pyrenees for cash, and do some part time home working.
It didn't work like that. Ski holidays at the girlfriend's sister's place in the Alps intervened, followed by "Ooooh, like it here", which significantly upped the budget, and ended up with us buying a huge and mostly derelict farm in the middle of nowhere. "Do it up over the course of a few years" was the plan.
Then, a few months later, the markets had a hiccup, my contract came up and they wanted to drop my rates (nope), the rental period on our new flat not-over-the-road-from-the-bluenote-but-in-the-shitty-soulless-docklands came up at the same time and they wanted to up the rent by 25% (nope), so "fuck it all", we got married (makes all the paperwork easier, plus 20/02/2002), bought a second hand transit van for my courier mate whose van had broken down (cheaper than renting one or paying a removals firm) shoved everything we could into it and buggered off to France.
Found ourselves camping in a farm with no hot water, no heating, no (indoor) toilet, no lights and one electrical socket. In March. In the Alps. With a 2-year-old. Spent spring / summer / autumn making the place liveable. Winter started to arrive, figured "probably need a job", wife's nephew said "come work on the slopes, it's a piece of piss and a good laugh". So I did, it was, and it was.
After a chance encounter with a bloke who works for the International Olympics Comittee, I spent a while doing IT in the summer and ski-bumming in the winter. Until I realised I was not having fun doing IT, getting paid fuck all for the hours I was doing, and I was totally missing the summer. So "bollocks to that", went from winter season to winter season and summer season, then to winter + summer + most of the autumn , then to the whole year.
It's a fuckload more fun, I spend my time increasing the amount of enjoyment in the world, and the IT stuff I do, I do for me. Because "crossword puzzles". And when the bloke I know at Google phones me up, as he does every six months or so, offering me untold riches and absolute freedom in what I do, I can tell him "no". Again.
Today I'll be lifting bikes off a chairlift. I get to have a laugh with the bikers, it's sunny, I'm outside, and the view from my office looks like this (extend to 360°) :