Introduction

You could easily make the argument that I’ve had a bad year.

If I wanted to disagree with that statement (and I do), I’m afraid I’d come up somewhat short on the evidence side. It would be hard to describe a twelve month period in which I’ve lost three jobs – not “jobs” in the disposable, McDonalds usage of the term, but “jobs” in the sense of the word of opportunities that most people try to think of as “careers” – moved from a nice house to a somewhat dingy apartment, and spent a month living out of a hotel in Oskaloosa Motherfucking Iowa, and less than a month ago experienced my first true, honest-to-goodness “firing” that I will have to explain away in every interview I ever experience from here on out, as anything but an unmitigated disaster.

But not only do I wish to mitigate that argument, I wish to refute it. Because despite what all the evidence says I should be feeling about my current situation, the exact opposite is what I actually feel. I spent the first four months of the year making a salary that equates to over $70,000 a year – not bad for a single guy under 30 at all – that should by all rights have been more than enough, if not to account for happiness, at least to facilitate it. Money can’t buy happiness, as the saying goes, but it can buy you a yacht that you can put to anchor at Happiness Island.

And yet, from January to April of this year, every single day represented a struggle to get out of bed, to get up, get showered, get dressed, and go into work. I’m not one prone to melodrama, but after that job was done, I made more than a few comments to people about how “at least I don’t feel like eating a bullet any more”. While that’s an exaggeration, and I’ve never been truly suicidal, only after I became unemployed did I fully understand just how miserable I’d been at my job. I’m not someone who’s cut out for 90 hour weeks at ANYTHING – shit, I can’t even play video games for 90 hours a week – and when you’re working 12 hour days, every day, for months on end, anyone of a mathematical inclination is going to figure out pretty quickly that even $70k a year is a shitty hourly wage. Toward the stretch of it, late last year, I actually had the balls to go to my boss and ask him for a promotion to 1st-term co-op, as with their hourly rate, it would have constituted a roughly 5% pay bump.

That all ended early in April, when I was called in for my performance review and placed in the “1” box, meaning that my employers valued me roughly on a level roughly comparable to that of a dung beetle. I was bluntly given the option of being fired or resigning, and I chose resigning. The review was bullshit – I had brought home a large project the previous year with essentially no issues, but I “didn’t fit in” (meaning I was an atheist in rural Texas) and my boss knew I was miserable, so he probably saw it as a mercy killing of sorts.

I took about a month off, which I spent mostly playing Guitar Hero 2 and sleeping in, until firing up the mighty monster.com and being inundated with approximately 4 phone interviews a day for the next couple of weeks. Eventually picking one out that seemed promising – an engineering consulting job that specialized in what I’m good at, PLC programming and HMI design – I was quickly given an offer for a two year contract working at a Cargill plant in Eddyville, Iowa. There was a three month “trial period” that everyone assured me was a near formality.

They didn’t even keep me for the three months. To this day I don’t know exactly what the problem was – I had done every last bit of work put in front of me and gotten specific kudos for it on multiple occasions, hell, I felt like I was a legitimate contributor after only a week – but almost exactly a month in, after two days I spent off sick (I was legitimately ill, a very bad cold), I got a call from my boss back in Kansas, at the consulting company I was a part of, telling me they’d pulled the plug. Somewhat shell-shocked, I asked why, and he said it was excessive Internet usage, which was puzzling as hell, considering my Internet usage was minimal at best and mostly to the purpose of getting an apartment in the area (I’d found an apartment, and was less than a week from signing a lease, but at least I was spared that). I can only figure I rubbed someone the wrong way, and that that person made it seen to that I was removed. I think I know who that person was, but have nothing more than that feeling to go on.

And so that weekend I drove back down to the house in Texas, and then back up to Kansas, on consecutive days, to start the position at the home base in Kansas that had been promised to me should the Iowa thing fall through. Where, as it turned out, they had essentially zero work for me, and where, as a result, my Internet usage actually was excessive. I spent almost four months in that office and only for about a week and a half did I ever actually have anything to do. That one project, I did well, and was given kudos. But the Friday before Thanksgiving week, my boss calls me into his office to inform me that they’ve decided to terminate my employment. The reason? Excessive Internet usage. And while, as I said, my Internet usage was excessive without a doubt, there were people in the office with me that spent most of their fucking work days playing World of Motherfucking Warcraft.

That was less than a month ago. And yet I feel better today than I think I’ve felt all year. And I’d even like to think that there’s more to do with that than simply the absence of a negative.