New Job!

I started a new job yesterday!

Technically, it's actually the same job (kitchen steward), and I'm still working for the same company. But now, instead of doing random shift work in different kitchens all over the place, I'll be on set hours, in one kitchen. I've also moved from Casual basis to Fulltime, so now I'll get sick leave and annual leave entitlements and the like. Also: my hours will mostly be 10:30am-6:30pm, with some variation in future possibly, but probably not much. The outlet I'm working for is a hotel lobby bar/coffee shop, and the kitchen is only open from 12noon to the early evening.

The last time I worked fulltime was way back in early 2011. So after six years of random odd shift work hours, it feels oddly luxurious and exotic to be on relatively "normal" hours again (although I'm still working weekends). Work doesn't start super early either, so it's about the best of both worlds for what I want at the moment.

It'll be interesting to see how my perception of the advantages and disadvantages of this move change over time. I think I'll definitely start to feel like I've got "more money than time" at some point, when it sinks in how it's just not always easy to take a few days off and go on a random little mini-holiday somewhere, or something.

Still, I'm happy I've made the move for now. It's especially awesome to have some off time in the evenings as a given.

Goodbye 2015

I haven't made any New Year's Resolutions for the past couple of years, and I'm not at all inspired to do so this year either. After all - years are just arbitrary numbers on a calendar - and the cycles are not always in tune with good timeframes for planning to achieve stuff, etc.

Still, there are plenty of both natural as well as societal things that come in yearly cycles, and - arbitrary calendar or not - around this time I like to reflect a bit on what happened over the previous year. As well as look at what's coming up in the New Year.

2015 was a pretty good year to me. There was quite a lot of awesome travel, lovely new friendships/connections in my social/"dating" life, and work has been relatively good and flexible around it all. I've been slightly underemployed at times, and we'll see what early 2016 brings in that regard, but for the moment I think it should be fine. I'm quite loving my whole work to live lifestyle, and am not tempted to make an attempt at getting back into a proper fulltime "career" just now, but who knows what the longer term future might bring....

The biggest change that is definitely coming for me in 2016 is that I'll be moving into my parents' apartment to house sit - from February until late in the year sometime. They are going on a massive trip around the world, and the overall situation involved just doesn't lend itself to leasing the place out. This should work pretty well, since my costs will be lower while I'll still get to live on my own, as well as still be based quite centrally, and in quite a nice apartment.

Other than this, there are no other huge plans just yet. There'll definitely be some local travel adventures, and possibly a bigger overseas one if things time well with when my parents are overseas in an interesting place where I can crash with them, but that possibility is still extremely vague.

So anyway, not much to say here, just another rambling end of year reflection post!

Happy 2016 to everyone!!

January - Grand Canyon, USA

February - Lunar New Year at Crown

March - Flinders Island

April - Fitzroy Street Art

May - Last Light at Birrarung Marr

June - Melbourne Street Art

July - Sunset in St Kilda

August - Last Light at Treasury Gardens

September - RJ Hamer Arboretum

October - Evening on Swanston Street

November - Toora Wind Farm

December - Sunset Light over Melbourne

Hospitality December

I just realised that I haven't blogged in a month. It's been an incredibly busy December at work. Truth be told, I actually don't even know where the month went. It was all a bit of a blur of night shifts and weird, hazy, unproductive, sleep-deprived days.

The big news is: I'm travelling to the US for a month in January! Planning this trip was part of what made December extra busy and surreal, but of course, work was what took the bulk of the time and energy.

The main impetus for this trip is to meet up with some special people over there, one of whom I met earlier in the year in Beijing, and another whom I'll be meeting for the first time. And then I'm taking the rest of the month to travel around the country solo - including crossing it by train. It promises to be quite the adventure!

I won't be taking my proper camera. As much as it's very tempting, it's also quite hard. I want to travel light, not look like too much of a "tourist", and not end up spending the whole trip behind the lens of a camera. I'll still have my smartphone though, which is perfectly adequate for holiday snaps.

So, it's Christmas Eve, and I'm off to work soon. Luckily, I picked up all the public holiday days that are coming up. So even though work is totally insane, at least it'll be a nice and productive ten days coming up.

Back to the grind....

Graveyard Shift

Well, after nearly a year in a job where 24-hour rosters are the norm, I've finally ended up on graveyard shift for the next three nights. That's Midnight to 6am! The last time I worked graveyard shift was some 15 years ago, and it was in a similar kitchen stewarding job to what I do now.

After nearly a year of working almost nothing but dinner shifts (around 6pm to around 2-3am), I'm actually finding this prospect refreshing. Unlike the dinner shift, graveyard shift actually overlaps a bit with "normal" sociable times, such as dinner time and evenings-after-work for most people. So it's quite possible to - for example - meet up with someone for dinner and then go to work. On the dinner night shifts on the other hand - you're only really overlapping with people who on the "normal" routine at silly times like early mornings, from ~3am until they wake up and go to work. So even if you're living with someone, you can't really see each other properly on working days!

Given my solo lifestyle, and that I'm not exactly the most sociable person in the world, it actually doesn't matter too much which shift I work. Of course, it's nice to be more available at "normal" sociable times than not - just for the opportunity value of having casual availability in your life routine to catch up with friends and family and such.

Furthermore, and oddly enough - despite seeming more "extreme" than the dinner shift - I actually think the graveyard shift would be better even with a family home life! ie The free time of your day is the late afternoon and evening, when kids and partners and such come home from school and work, so you can spend time with them. Unlike on the dinner shift where you're generally well and truly on the way to work by the time they're coming home. And the only "overlap" you have with them is a rather useless time - the wee hours of the morning when you come home and the household is asleep, and just wakes up and runs out the door in the morning while you're trying to sleep.

Well, one thing I haven't fully experienced yet - since I'm only starting my first shift tonight - is what working graveyard shift will do to my sleep patterns. I've had a lot of late finishes and sleeping in until past midday on the dinner shift, and that has been pretty easy to beat and get back on day schedules for days off. Maybe graveyard will be more difficult, since it is even further from the norm, but I guess the next three days will tell.

One thing seems to be certain though - at least from what everybody who has worked this shift has been telling me - it is very very easy. They all say that there is "nothing to do", that it's boring. And of course, as I wrote nearly two years ago, that's just fine with me.

Conditions vs Meaning

I had an epiphany the other day regarding something I wrote almost a year ago in these two posts: Good conditions can totally "make" a job. To the point where they can even override what you actually do on the job.

As I mentioned in the previous post - a couple of weeks ago I basically took a relatively lowly kitchen assistant type job over a software engineering one. Now granted, I'm not exactly super passionate about clawing my way back into the software development profession in the first place - but the feel of the office space at the place I interviewed certainly gave me a bad vibe too.

So the choice was basically this: a BoH kitchen job in a five star resort complex where I know the conditions are going to be awesome, versus a software development job in a place which may very well turn out to be a bit of a codemonkey sweatshop.

I suppose it comes down to what I wrote before about "alienated labour" versus "meaningful work". If you love certain work so much that it aligns with your sense of career fulfillment even when you're doing it for someone else for an external reward - that's great! But when you don't, then it's actually much easier to just step right away from trying to find any real meaning in your work, and truly treat it as just a job.

To some extent I envy people who can do that. The whole problem with me and knowledge work is that I have trouble "whoring out my brain". If an intellectual exercise doesn't truly inspire me, on a personal level, my patience with it goes out the window before it was even in the room. Of course, with jobs which let you keep your head - this isn't an issue at all. The only "challenge" is to put up with a certain level of repetition and boredom, which is in fact relatively easy once you've got some basic meditation techniques down.

Still, it's interesting to think about this from the point of view of "equivalent" jobs too. I never gave this much thought before. But there's definitely a reason why companies like Google are considered great to work for, while your average corporate cubicle codemonkey job is considered to be a burnout-waiting-to-happen. It largely comes down to conditions.

Sure, the content of the work matters too - it's generally more interesting to work on cool cutting-edge technologies than to maintain boring obscure business systems that were designed in the 1990s - but good conditions are what really makes it. And when conditions get past a certain extreme (good or bad) threshold, then even the underlying occupation involved can be overridden by them.

I got a job!

It's been a busy couple of weeks! Several major things have happened in my life over the past two weeks, but I'll just cover the work situation here:

About a month ago I started applying for all sorts of random jobs. Pretty much anything I possibly might be able to get. And then two weeks ago, three of them suddenly came through. Two of them were very promising interviews which looked like they might come up with an offer, and one actually did come up with an offer. And I took it. It's a kitchen job in a five star resort complex.

One of the others was a software engineering role in a small company - so this led to some interesting career direction pondering: Should I try to give my old career another crack? Or should I just go with the kitchen job? Noting that I'd already accepted the kitchen job offer, and it would really be bad form to pull out within a week or two of signing the contract and going through their induction and all. So I decided to go with the flow of least bad karma there. The software company hadn't even offered anything officially yet, so withdrawing that application wasn't really such a big deal.

At any rate, I'm starting at my new job tonight. I've had a very full week of (paid) induction and training, but no actual work yet. As far as back-of-house hospitality jobs go, I don't think you can really do any better. But we'll see how it goes with the actual work tonight of course. And with the routine that follows in the next couple of weeks.

Sydney Train Trip - June 2013

This is mostly going to be a shameless "holiday snaps" post. So probably quite boring, unless you're interested in seeing what the train trip between Melbourne and Sydney roughly looks like. And seeing a few random Sydney pics - the type that most holidaymakers to Sydney would take.

A bit of background - the trip was actually for a job interview. The (potential) job isn't in Sydney, but the company was interviewing everyone in Sydney - it's for a huge project and they're interviewing for potentially tens of roles! So they brought everyone to Sydney for a "recruiting event" - just to get everyone into one spot and keep it simple and efficient. They are looking for relatively specialised talent, hence the spread of recruiting. I'm not really sure how I went - but will find out in 7-10 days.

It was all kinda bizarre, being on a fully funded "business trip" when unemployed. My first company-funded "business trip" ever too. There was something about sitting in a fancy bistro at the Sydney Harbour Marriott munching on a club sandwich that made me feel like the weirdest mix of Unemployed Bum and Successful Professional ever. It was definitely an experience!

Anyway, here are the photos. Starting from pulling out of Melbourne on the 3th of June, some Sydney pics mostly from the 4th of June, and then coming back again on the 5th.

Pulling out of Melbourne

Victorian countryside 1

Victorian countryside 2

Victorian countryside 3

Southern New South Wales countryside

Sunset from the train at Gunning

My hotel room

View of Sydney from friend's apartment 1

View of Sydney from friend's apartment 2

View of Sydney from friend's apartment 3

Opera House

Weird Thingy (lamp?)

Opera House Roof

View of CBD from Opera House

Wild rainbow lorikeet at cafe

Wild but friendly!

Sydney by night from friend's apartment

Pulling out of Sydney

Foggy countryside on the way back

Career Epiphany

So I've had a bit of a "reverse brainfart" over all my career-related issues ...

Last Thursday evening, I was out getting a casual dinner at a little diner on Chapel Street, and saw some office workers walking around on their way home from work. Suddenly I was reminded of the days when I was one of them - and how in context it doesn't have to be so bad.

Initially I felt like a total tool. Like these last two years and three months have been all for nothing. But then it quickly hit me that it's not the case at all - it was all part of a journey. The realisations could never have happened in the state I was in back in late 2010. If I had tried to face it down - I simply would have ended up stewing more and more, potentially going nuts in the process.

I think a lot of it comes down to accepting a situation you're in emotionally, rather than purely intellectually. ie It's easy enough to intellectually understand that a "job is just a job" for example - and not take it personally when it's not a little slice of heaven every day. But if you don't emotionally grasp that, you can slowly dig yourself into a hole which leads to burnout. I can see that now, and know when to fold in future. Though I suspect that now I'd do a lot better - and last a lot longer and be more productive - even in jobs which I find incredibly mind-numbing.

So where to now? - I'm not 100% sure yet. I've re-done my CV. Created three versions of it for different types of jobs in fact. But mostly I'll be looking in an IT specialisation which I haven't directly worked in before (although I'd been in that kind of role informally at times - as part of jobs which were officially something else).

I'm not expecting to get something in a hurry. I've got a career gap on my CV now which will probably take some serious selling. But we'll see how it goes.

Driving - why context is Everything

I got asked a couple of weeks ago why it is that I'm trying to get into a driving-based job, considering that I've been quite vocal in the past about how much I "hate driving" - back when I was living in a suburban sprawl-based situation and having to drive everywhere. It's a reasonable question I suppose...

The answer is: Context.

The problem with driving for me was never the driving itself. It was the overall context of the situation. I disliked the idea of being in the Middle Of Nowhere in suburban sprawl, and having to waste heaps of time each day driving to uni/work to another Middle Of Nowhere in suburban sprawl. The act of driving acted as a time waster, one that always seemed irrational and pointless. ie. Why not live more sensibly? Somewhere where my "daily life routine destinations" are more conveniently close by? "And why are Australian cities built so stupidly and suburban sprawly dammit!"

Of course, life can't always be set up so neatly, and there isn't much point getting angry at things you can't change. There are logical factors which might make long commutes necessary at some stages of life, for whatever reason. But the general point stands - it wasn't "driving" in itself that was ever the problem for me. It was the context in which I had to waste a lot of time on it. Time which was essentially my own private time, which I would rather have spent doing something else.

The truth is, I actually enjoy driving, when it's done in a recreational context - or else a professional one. And doing it as a job, where all that time is paid for by the hour, is a totally different experience that way - compared to being "forced" by circumstance to drive everywhere every day and waste a lot of my own time and money on it. I guess it could be said that commuting is part of the job - but when I was younger, I guess I was less patient, and it was harder to think of it that way, but now even that bothers me a lot less - though I would still try to avoid it if at all possible - which is a big part of why I live in the inner city.

So yes, it seems like a contradiction at face value - "hating driving but wanting a driving-based job". But it's not really. The "hate" was never for the driving. It was for the context of time wasting, and for the irrationality of low-density suburban sprawl, which is what leads to so much car-dependency (and easily being "forced" into life situations where you have to routinely drive a lot) in the first place.

Unemployed again

I quit my casual hospitality job yesterday. Going in tonight for the last shift, and that'll be it...

It's been an interesting experience, especially the Kosher shifts. Watching a rabbi cleansing a kitchen with fire (blowtorches) is one of those experiences you tend to only read about, unless life somehow finds you in the weird position of being able to witness it for real.

Other than this, it was generally a regular casual hospitality job. I stayed in it longer than most do. Most of the other kitchenhands of my time passed through within 1-3 months or so. I was one of the main guys for nearly 7 months, until recently when the roster became a bit saturated with casuals (who were taken on for the end of year "function season") and then business dropped off for the summer break.

I thought hard about this - whether to stay on or leave. But after getting no shifts for three weeks, I realised it wasn't working any more. I was holding back from making plans (especially weekend plans) and living life because of the possibility of being called in at the last moment at any time. It's just the nature of the business of a function centre - they can only really know how many staff they'll need when the numbers are finalised and exact meal configurations organised. If it was only going to be the odd shift per fortnight or so, living with this uncertainty wasn't worth the little bit of extra income any more, so I decided to cut loose.

Being fully unemployed is a great motivator for getting serious about the job hunt. There's that nervousness watching your savings falling when absolutely nothing is coming in. At least now I know exactly what I want to do. When looking for work last time, I was literally looking at anything I could get. Now I know that I want a driving-based job. And pretty much any will do for a start, because any experience in this area counts for moving up.

I have a truck licence!

Whew! What a long week...

I went for my heavy vehicle licence training this week. Initially I thought about going for a lower grade licence (such as the one for small or medium trucks only), but then I thought I should get it all out of the way in one go and earn the hardest possible one - "Heavy Rigid Non-Synchromesh". This is the biggest jump you can make from having a car licence, and it entitles you to drive basically any kind of truck except for semi trailers and road trains.

The leaning experience itself was quite interesting. A lot of information to take in, and driving huge trucks was quite an assault on the senses for the first time. The first day I walked away with a headache, but after that it was better. I seem to have a natural talent for reversing large trucks - because from day one I never got the reversing manoeuvre wrong (this is something that's very difficult for some people).

After resting this weekend, I'm going to get stuck right into job hunting on Monday. Firstly research what would be the best thing to aim for initially, but then probably apply across the board for anything I can get to begin with.

Meaningless Work

This is mostly a followup to the last post "Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work". I wanted to get it out sooner, but I haven't been feeling too well for the last couple of weeks...

Anyway, in the last post I mentioned how it pays to think about what we can put up with on the job, rather than totally concentrating on finding work that will be meaningful to us. The idea there is that virtually all paid work (anything that isn't truly nearly 100% aligned with one's personal passions) will eventually become a bit of a grind to us - so it's important to be able to "put up" with the particular kind of grind, rather than solely concentrating on finding positives in a potential occupation.

This is nothing radical I suppose. It's just one of the aspects of looking at strengths and weaknesses (and "putting up with an aspect that's generally seen as a negative" is essentially a strength), but I think this often gets glossed over in favour of looking for fulfilment from a job. It seems more positive to think "what will I enjoy?" rather than "what won't drive me nuts?", but I think a balance of the two questions is a good approach.

Meaningless Jobs

My own journey with "meaningless jobs" has been reasonably varied. I've been everything from a paper boy, pizza delivery boy, cleaner (janitor), warehouse hand, kitchen assistant and door-to-door charity collector. All of these jobs had their moments, but of course none were real careers or particularly exciting. However, they did offer a big variety of experiences which - in hindsight - really tested the above theory: the types of boredoms and frustrations in them were radically different.

eg. As a pretty extreme introvert, I have to say that the frustration of dealing with "negative human contact" is particularly draining to me. This is why I couldn't handle face-to-face charity collection, or anything which involved a "hard sell" or dealing with difficult customers. Pizza delivery was actually okay in that regard, because the human contact there is almost always totally positive - you're not trying to sell people something - you're brining them something they're eagerly anticipating.

But to get right to the point - my introversion also means that one of my key strengths in putting up with "meaningless jobs" is simply tolerance for boredom and loneliness. Tasks which many people find extremely lonely and mind-numbing (such as standing in front of an industrial dishwasher and loading dishes into it all evening) are fine for me. I can essentially switch off, go into a kind of meditative stance, and just kill time and go through the motions. It's certainly not always "fun", or something I'd want to do forever, but it's far less taxing than jobs which require constantly being switched on to unpredictable human contact, or needing to sustain focus on something which I'm not really entirely "into".

Conclusion

The conclusion I've come to is that a good approach for me would be to look for work where the main challenge - as far as most people's perception is concerned anyway - is simply tolerance for boredom and loneliness. Finding basic "meaning" is relatively easy. All work is "meaningful", by definition. People wouldn't want it done and wouldn't pay you for it if it didn't mean something to them. But of course this is quite abstract, and can't sustain my motivation if I'm pushing against the grain of my personality (and strengths and weaknesses) with a job long term.

I actually enjoy practical work - as in directly seeing physical objects being created, modified, or moved around. It somehow feels more tangible and meaningful to me than sitting in an office pushing buttons (even though I rationally know that knowledge work is just as "real"). But looking at it from the other side - I find it much easier to put up with the grind of relatively repetitive and lesser skilled practical work than professional knowledge work. 

I have some clearer ideas now regarding what I'll go for in 2013 anyway. I'll leave the specifics out for now, but I'll write more when I actually sign up for it.

Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that causes boredom and frustration at work.

I think there is a lot to be said for Marx's theory of alienation. My own brief description - and interpretation of it for the purposes of this post - is this: "It sucks to work for someone else on something you don't really truly care about, for some external reward which has nothing directly to do with the work (such as money)."

In a twisted way though, I think it's actually quite possible to shoot yourself in the foot by trying to find "meaningful work". My burnout in software development was a classic illustration of this: I loved programming as a hobby and a pure craft, but working for other people on random boring business systems for money slowly ground me down until I simply couldn't take it any more. Essentially, the work was still "alienated labour", despite in theory doing something that I might otherwise enjoy, in a more personally-inspired or hobby context.

Artists report this feeling when doing commissioned works where they are told in detail what to do, as opposed to doing their own thing, or generally being allowed near-complete creative freedom in commissioned work. Obviously, in business this is almost impossible to escape, because the chances of your personal creative passion aligning with business objectives 100% at all times is extremely low in most types of work.

So how to fix this?

I think there is a lot to be said for the idea of treating a job as just a job. This basically acknowledges that it's just some alienated labour that you're doing for money, and you don't get too caught up with any deeper meaning behind it. Boredom, frustration, and eventual burnout are still possible of course - but they can be mitigated by the act of simply finding a comfortable flow without expecting any kind of existential fulfilment from the whole thing.

After a decade in a "meaningful career", versus years of odd casual jobs (including my current gig as a KP), what I've found is that 1) It's actually much easier for me to treat menial work as "just a job" and tolerate it on that level, and 2) Everybody has strengths and weaknesses which make certain "menial jobs" vastly more tolerable than others, even if they're not very "meaningful" to us.

For me, the key to occupational sanity seems to be almost the exact opposite of "finding meaningful work". That is: finding work which is so meaningless that I can tolerate it simply by not expecting anything at all from it other than going in, grinding out the time, and being paid for it. The less "engagement", the better. Well, that's the theory anyway!

In practice, it's more of a balance of course. Focusing on the "positives" of jobs can sometimes lead us astray. Often it's just as important to ask - "Which types of 'negatives' would I be good at tolerating?", which, granted, is really just another "strength" and a positive - but many people don't like to talk like that. And every job interview advice source tells you to speak in positives and avoid drawing attention to negatives, which I think in this case tends to feed back into people's evaluation of occupation choice and glosses over something that's actually quite important.

I'll write a follow-up to this soon, but for now, this describes the general abstract idea of how I'm looking to tackle this issue.

"Downshifting" interview

I was interviewed by a sociology professor at RMIT yesterday. It's for an upcoming book about people who leave the corporate rat race and do something "alternative" with their lives - generally in the sense of less conventionally "successful".

It was an interesting experience. I told her upfront that it would be better if she asks me specific questions than if I try to just tell the story, because that would lead to some serious rambling. In the end, it was exactly as I expected - many threads of thought tying together to give a fairly decent picture of what happened, albeit all quite disorganised and general.

One thing I realised was that - unlike certain other people who leave the corporate rat race to become starving artists or photographers or whatever - I didn't do it to follow any specific creative "passion". It was more of a push than a pull so to speak. Being pushed out of the corporate grind by burnout, rather than pulled out of it by ideas of concentrating on something else. ie Something more personally meaningful.

Then again, in a sense it could also be said that I simply appreciate going with the flow. Being poor and free rather than a comfortable slave. So on some very abstract, Zen-like level, having all that relatively aimless and "unproductive" time off was a pull force of sorts. The past year has been perhaps the strangest of my life - and I'm starting to think that the aimlessness and emptiness of some of it was necessary. Necessary to create the headspace for all the personal and "occupational" epiphanies that I've had.

In the end, she asked me if I'm overall happier now. It's something I haven't even asked myself directly ever since leaving the corporate world in January 2011. But yes. I am. Absolutely!