Its career-change time (part of that mystical “everything you know is worng”) (yes, that’s intentional, again).

I’m tired of working in a big office, of being less a known entity than a face and name and employee number. Surprisingly, I’m tired of not having enough work to do, and of not being noticed if I’m in or not. Sure those, last two are nice, some days — but damn it, if I’m forced to be here forty plus hours a week, make it for a reason. Otherwise, instead of me pretending to work, you pretend I’m working instead of hanging out at home doing freelance. Hey, you get paid more than me, so you do the pretending…*

I’d like to find a place that can take advantage of more than one of my skills. I kind of have that now — I do some design, some programming, some writing — but I need all of that plus a little room to be creative. And, as I’ve mentioned before, creativity by committee is not such a fun idea.

The days at Heckler’s could have been ideal, maybe (although I feel certain that I’m glamorizing this a lot in retrospect). There was a fair amount of creativity, and I did a little of literally everything — writing, design, programming, multimedia. And for christsakes, it was all video games and comic books and horror movies, so how bad could it be? Well, of course, I’m leaving out the drama and politics and soap opera atmosphere, and the financial aspect (a classic case of the tail end of the dot-com boom, where the founders were rich and getting richer, and those of us on the bottom of the food chain were making less than busboys at chain restaurants).

And TapeSouth was a decent enough gig, too, though I don’t know that I ever felt appreciated or recognized for my abilities. No, I’m not the engineer that Daniel is (or even then, was), nor the designer that Ginger was / is. But I was one of the only people that could do everything from start to finish on a project,and except when I was being lazy (good lord, the idea of QC’ing another 2,500 cassette job in this lifetime is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat), I was damned good at the job. Not good enough to help keep the business afloat, unfortunately, but so it goes…

And then, I consider going back to bartending. Cause the money’s great, the job is easy, and the perks are often well worthwhile. Of course, that’s probably a terrible idea in the long term, but hey — I got this far without thinking about the future? Why start now?

I’m reasonably sure that’s mostly a joke, sort of.

* thanks to Bill Hicks, who is dead but still fucking funny