I didn’t say much about the project as it was happening, partly because I generally avoided talking about work business on here and partly because there just wasn’t time. But it was just exactly this time last year that everything really went sideways and pear-shaped, and my conflicting urges – to be a stupendous badass and to be left alone – really got me deep in the shit. I avoided punching this particular tar baby for as long as I could, but I wound up stuck worse than Br’er Rabbit ever did, and there wasn’t any briar patch to beg my way into instead.
It was a combination of every single work trauma I’d ever had to that point: excessive-to-the-point-of-actual-pain physical labor, arbitrary deadlines, an ill-defined project with incompetent leadership, tons of extra bodies of the “now does anyone hear speak Windows, with some difficulty?” variety (including, famously, one contractor who just wandered off after I explained the process and decided he would do something else). Not to mention ridiculous hours, horrifyingly bad nutrition, and severe inattention to personal maintenance (i.e. a hipster neck beard of the sort I’d normally shoot myself in the face rather than wear). Normal duties, which of course I was still on the hook for, fell further and further behind. My shoulder, which two rounds of steroid injections had mostly sorted, was soon hurting worse than ever…
– Feb 12, 2014
It was five years ago that I got dragooned into assisting with what is now recalled to memory as “the encryption project.” I don’t think I grasped at the time how much of a pivot point that would be in my life. It was like I’d coasted on one year of borrowed time after turning 40, but then everything went to shit at once. The exodus from the Bay Area of all my local friends kicked into high gear, my physical health hit the wall, and that was about the time I first started to notice that Caltrain was becoming an untenable way to get to work. (Not least because I found myself going between the third and second busiest stations in the system and then having to take a 20-minute shuttle bus ride each way to boot.) My recurring shoulder pain, my disillusion with Shallow Alto specifically and the Bay Area in general, the rise of the bicycle menace, the rapid-onset depression about my career path and future opportunities – it all started spinning out of control in late January, 2013.
I honestly didn’t use to be this way. As late as 2012, when there was still a coffee cart at the Caltrain station in the mornings and I basically never saw anyone riding right down the VTA platform past the “No cycling, skateboarding or rollerblading” signs, I was blogging about how much I enjoyed being up in the city and filling my “what have I enjoyed in my life in this year” list with notes about drinks on Polk and chasing fog through the Avenues and checking out one craft cocktail place after another and spending weekends in a borrowed apartment on King Street near the ballpark. By 2014, I didn’t really have anything I enjoyed in the city anymore. This Valley turned hot and it turned nasty and it turned ever more dickish, and it was pretty obvious that I was on the wrong side of what counted. And I’m white, and male, and reasonably well off. If turning 40 is all it takes to put you on the outside of Silly Con Valley looking in, how much worse is it if you’re female, or the wrong ethnicity, or not even tangentially inside the tech bubble?
In a way, it worked out for the best. Three years of abject misery eventually turned into a make-good with more money for less work while retaining the same sort of “dare you to fire me” job security. I’ll never get rich, I’ll never get options or stock, but there’ll be plenty of vacation and I can do a hell of a job with 66% effort. And as I age into the back half of my career – knowing full well that retirement isn’t really on the cards anytime soon, if ever – I’m taking the off days now, taking the vacations now, making that conscious effort to build my life on something other than work because I know the rifles of the EUS aren’t walking through that door and finding another place isn’t going to be the miracle cure. I don’t know how many fresh starts I have in me at this point, and I don’t know how many I’m up for undertaking – I’ve had a couple fresh starts too many for building continuity and the kind of community and base I wish I’d developed by now.
Instead of hitting the reset, make the best of what’s in front of you, or else be prepared to deal with the enormity of pulling up sticks to move to Ireland. I guess that’s the lesson at this point.