After thinking about it for two months or so, I have just officially said goodbye to my lucrative career driving an 18-wheeler and traded it in for a job changing oil and tires at Wal-Mart for less than half of what I used to make.
Believe me, I'd love to entertain other options, and I've been trying to find some other kind of job the whole time. Some "none of the above" Option C in this. I just can't find anything else to do with myself right now. The only jobs that feel like the kind of thing I'd like to do for a living are only available as short-term temp gigs that are few, far between, and difficult to get even for all that. I just can't live from temp job to temp job. That kind of uncertainty was fine when I was a kid with no real responsibilities, but I can't live like that now. So I've stepped back to a fork in the road, and I'm going to follow the other path, and see where I would have ended up if I had stayed on at Wal-Mart instead of quitting to go to truck driving school. I'm actually starting pretty close to where I left off 11 years ago, and I don't have to begin at the very beginning all over again, so it's possible to see how this is going to play out within a year or so. It's a really surreal place to be in life. Part of me can't take working at Wal-Mart seriously at all. WTF am I thinking? But it's somewhere to jump to in order to get off the ship I'm on before it sinks. I rode the last one to the bottom, and getting laid off was miserable. I have good intelligence that the job I'm leaving is going to evaporate by December anyway, and I have no intention of riding that train all the way to the bit where we see whether the tracks are going to end abruptly at a ravine or not. If my successor is still working this time next year, I'll probably feel like an idiot, but if he's going over the road for $0.30 a mile getting paid on a 1099 with no benefits, no paid vacations, sick days, etc., I'll probably be tapdancing all the way to the oil changing pit. (Though hopefully by this time next year I will have long since escaped the Tire and Lube Express anyway. I'm taking that job because that's what they need at the moment, and I'm going to be flexible, and make myself as useful as possible.) I'm glad I'm getting out of that, and I'm glad I have finally reached the decision that no, I absolutely will not go over the road. (The easiest way by a gigantic margin to find a job in the trucking business.) But I do wish I had been able to come up with a plan that would involve less hardship. We are going to be desperately poor like we haven't seen in more than a decade, and I hate being poor. I'm not begging anyone for donations, but if anyone wants to part with some cash, I'll gladly accept anything. I'm ruined, financially. Totally ruined. I'll keep my internet connection as long as possible, but it's definitely on the "luxuries to be dispensed with" side of the ledger if it comes to that, and it well may. But I hope I can be a happier man after this. I've been profoundly unhappy with the direction my life was taking for a long time now, and while I am frankly terrified of what's to come, and sitting here in shocked disbelief that I actually went through with this, after around two months of waffling, I'm also glad I don't have to drive a truck anymore, and I can put that behind me now. I wish I had been able to find a more tidy way to escape a career I long since started to hate, but at least I did escape in the end. Wish me luck, everyone! -- D. Michael McIntyre ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
