In 48 hours, I will be unemployed.
I wanted to be all cool and say “two days and a wake-up” but that’s not really the case. My tenure ends at 5:00PM Thursday, not the next morning. I won’t have to maintain my on-call duties Thursday night. So In just about two days, I’m out of a job.
(It’s just for a day. Well, three if you count the weekend. I start my new position on Monday, so it’s not as dramatic as all that.)
For the past 14.5 months or so I’ve been working for a MSP doing tier 2 support. It’s had its moments, and I really like the people I work with, and I’ve learned a lot—but man, MSP work is not the most fun thing in the world. Fielding issues for customers in widely divergent environments, working with third-party software you didn’t install or configure, having five people at once trying to insist their problem is the one that deserves your attention the most and having no real metric to make the call… it wears on you. (That, and on-site visits requiring hours of driving are nicely meditative but really ruin your productivity.)
So when a headhunter hit me with an opportunity that’s much more in my wheelhouse and would allow me to actually use the shiny new cloud and networking degree I’m working towards, I couldn’t really say no. My MSP doesn’t really do a lot with cloud, and our networking guy’s a literal wizard so I’m never getting his chair. So I’ve got to bid everyone adieu and move literally across the street to my new position. It’s an energy company, so I guess my karma will take something of a hit, but I’ll get to do new things.
I do feel bad leaving my team in something of a lurch. They just lost another member of the tier 2 squad a few weeks ago and were working towards replacing them when my opportunity landed in my lap, so my departure is leaving the team even more short-handed than it is now. And boy, we’re feeling it. The last several days have been an absolute firehose of problems, with all hands on deck scrambling to try to put out fires. I did my best to find a replacement, though, and they should be making a decision about who gets my seat shortly.
Before the MSP, I did MSP-lite work for a fiber provider, and it was kind of miserable. The company really didn’t value our team and never made a secret of that fact, keeping us as lowly contract employees while everyone else got hired on and supplied with benefits and work-from-home privileges. There were days when my squad would literally be the only humans in the building, outside of the security guards. Driving into a facility and fighting traffic just to do an entirely remote job where your boss and most of your coworkers are only connected to you via Teams tends to make you question the decision-making process of some of the folks somewhere along the line.
Before that, I spent the lion’s share of my career as a transcriptionist, which was fun but a whole other hassle. It was great working from home on my own schedule and getting to see the inner workings of Hollywood, albeit from a remote perspective. What wasn’t great was constantly having to dance my ass off to maintain enough work to keep the lights on, especially with the downward pressure on pay from outsourcing and the rise of AI. Eventually, I saw the writing on the wall and made my shift to touching computers for a living.
Before that, I had a few office jobs, and pulled a stint in the Postal Service—and let me say I understand how “going postal” happens. Every day you walk in with hundreds of thousands of microtasks sitting in front of you, and when you leave, there’s hundreds of thousands of microtasks waiting for your return. Absolutely no sense of accomplishment whatsoever. That place wore me down something fierce, and I eventually borderline had a breakdown as it coincided with the collapse of my first marriage.
My first job, though, was a blast, and it’s still the one I think I enjoyed the most. Selling comic books for a living. I managed a comics and games shop for several years, and my days consisted of talking to people and selling them things, shooting the shit on various topics, and recommending new genres and properties and fandoms for them to check out. If it had paid worth a damn, I definitely would’ve stuck with it longer, and I’ve got some very fond memories of that time. That is, after all, where I met Sid.
What do I want to do most, though? This. This right here. Stacking words on top of each other, telling you a story—a real one or not—and being your word-style hero. Who knows, I might actually get there one day.
I mean, whether or not I ever get paid properly for it, I’m going to keep writing, because this is what I do.