Tag: work

Categories
culture life

Another Anniversary

I found it ironic to look at the title of my last post. Today marks the one year anniversary of when I started my job – or rather, my former job. Out of the blue today I was informed that I have been laid off because the company is not getting the contracts that they had been hoping to get. This should not have been surprising considering that 25% of the employees were working on overhead projects while waiting for some of the expected contracts to come through. I should have forseen this possibility, but I didn’t.

Now that I am no longer employed there I guess I have free reign to rant about what a lousy company it was etc. Too bad there’s so little to complain about. It was a good company that delivered exactly what they promised to me as an employee. They treated me well and generally took care of me while I worked there.

The only complaint I have is not with the company, but with the current nature of our economy. I am not talking about the unemployment rate or the GNP or anything like that. I am talking about how different things are now from when I was growing up. As a child I was introduced to a world where employees tended to stay with one company for years and companies tended to give their full-time employees benefits such as a contract stating that their job could not be terminated without some warning (unless they violated company policies or something). Employees, in turn, were required to give notice in order to quit their jobs. Today we live in a world where people rarely stay in one job for more than a couple of years – either by choice or because of downsizing. Employment contracts or more often “at will” so that nobody needs to give any notice before the employment is over. Such was the case today. I was told “Today is your last day. We have to let some people go and you are among them. Sorry. Good luck.”

It was not that terse. They were as nice as they could be, considering that there is no nice way to say “sorry, you’re out of a job.” It’s just sad that we live in a day where stability is the exception and not the rule.

Categories
life

Stifled, Stiphled, Ctiphl’d

I have been struggling for some time now feeling that life did not allow for me to do the things that I would like to do.

All I ask out of life is the opportunity to be a good father and to do something useful with the remainder of my life. I have the opportunity to be a good father, but the remainder of my life seems to be stuck in the daily grind of doing something without purpose which will pay the bills. It’s not that the work is bad, but it makes no use of any talent of mine and accomplishes nothing which would be considered an improvement in society.

If my goals were different – perhaps if all I wanted to do was to be a good father and to not worry about how to pay my bills – then this job would be fine. When my goals include doing work that would be of benefit to other people then this does not cut it. The thing that really galls me about being stuck in this merry-go-round of purposeless mediocrity is that I am convinced that no matter what line of productive work I chose there should be some opportunity to do it for some beneficial purpose. If I were in some line of work as generic as accounting, I could do it for a non-profit or charitable organization which focused on a cause I believed in. If my talent were to be a business owner, I could use my business to help others. I could perhaps employ young people who needed work or experience.

The point is that I believe that I could work in my current profession and feel that I was doing some good – unfortunately my current job is not such a position.

That is why I feel stifled enough to need to make up new spellings of the word.

Categories
culture

Conservation

I was interested to read about Homesourcing and be reminded that I seem to be caught between two radical philosophies concerning conservation and energy independence. Radical not because they are unreasonable or extreme, but because they are so different from the most common proposals for energy independence.

Homesourcing is really another name for tele-commuting, the other radical approach is espoused by some bicycle enthusiasts I know – bike to work. Each of these ideas appeals to me in different ways. I will not expound on homesourcing (since I have linked to it) but biking to work adds the advantage of keeping yourself in shape although it limits how far you can live from the office. The only downside to homesourcing is that there really is something to be said for mixing in the same physical location with other people that you are working with.

Maybe I should bike to work two or three days a week and then work from home the rest of the week. That would be about the best of both worlds.