A Funny Thing Happened

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Just over two years ago, I found the perfect job. It's nothing I'd ever considered doing before, but it fits me so well sometimes I can't believe they pay me to do it. It took a while to find the right job, though.

The day I graduated from college, I accepted a job as a laser printer guru with a tech company in my hometown. It had three redeeming qualities. First, it paid a lot more than being an unemployed musician. Second, the company allowed employees a few hours a week of semi-directed project time, if it didn't interfere with normal work. Third, it offered some room for advancement.

My training group had ten people and there were thirty more in my department. I enjoyed the work part of the time, especially when I had to research an odd customer problem, and I made the most of my project time to study technologies that interested me. During that period, I worked on some proof of concept software to store and retrieve information to and from hard drives in large, departmental printers. I also wrote a small application for our department to track customer queries about specific printer models and another application for another department to help them keep their web site up to date.

At the six month performance review, they handed me a $25 gift certificate and the standard raise that everyone remotely competent received.

That's when I followed a co-worker to apply to a different job with the same company. I became a system administrator for a 60 person group, keeping their computers running smoothly and working with the sitewide technology group to keep our services running. I replaced a well-liked guy who didn't like to work. He had left several half-completed projects and woeful documentation. For the first three months, I fought fires and tried to understand what I had to do.

Then my work dropped off, slowly at first, but steadily.

In my previous position, I'd made the acquaintance of a couple of guys running a technology website. They wanted original content and occasionally ran book reviews. In the hopes of having free books once in a while, I offered to do a couple of reviews. They didn't send any books, but they did send me their guidelines. I had forgotten all about this until I went to Powell's Technical on a trip to Portland and picked up a new book. After rushing through it, I wrote a review, sent it off, and finally saw my name in lights.

I didn't expect that Jeff would consider me his best reviewer from that point on; I still think he had confused me with someone else. Every few weeks, he'd send out a list of new books for his top reviewers to request. I'd pick out two or three, read them at work while waiting for something to do, and write the reviews at home.

This was a great hobby, especially because my library kept growing at a very reasonable cost. I could also experiment at work with writing software — free software — and gradually developed my skills. This would be important later.

Toward the end of my stint as a system administrator, some weeks would go by where I had only one or two real problems to solve. It didn't help that the company as a whole had frozen technology spending. (I'd spent 3% of my budget for the year and had a whole batch of new computers to buy as the new models came out. Then the corporate axe struck and I couldn't even buy new toner for the color printer.)

From one standpoint, they were still paying me to be there in case something happened. I argued to myself that the research I was doing could pay off for my group. It did, a couple of times, as they asked me more and more questions about what was possible, not if I could rebuild a Windows installation.

Yet the technology budget squeeze was a sign. Soon, they decided to discontinue my program, turning some fifty or sixty dedicated system administrators into twenty second-level phone support people. Where an engineer might have a problem and call me over to fix it in an hour, he'd now have to call someone in a different state who'd try to fix it over the phone, then call someone local to schedule a time when someone could walk from a completely different building and try to fix things. If an engineer's time cost $300 an hour and mine cost $60, was it worth it?

I didn't have another job lined up, but a friend wanted to go on a trip to the middle east that spring. My father pointed out that I'd probably never again have the opportunity to take a summer off. I quit gracefully on the day I'd have had to leave my group anyway. That summer, the website paid me modestly for doing a hugely ambitious review of all of the current Linux books. I picked up some other contract work.

More importantly, I met the online community manager for my favorite publisher. She loved seeing my reviews of their books online and offered to cut out the middleman and send me any book I wanted if I'd continue to review them. What a deal! (She also sent me Swiss chocolate once. Yum.)

The summer came and went and I didn't have any real job options lined up. I had paid off all of my student loans, so I didn't need a lot of money coming in to pay the rent. That's when my friend at the publisher suggested that I take some of the ideas I'd played with and turn them into a book proposal.

At that point I didn't know that technical books don't make the authors much money, and it seemed really cool to say that I was writing a book, so I wrote a proposal, talked to an editor, and heard nothing... until they asked me to take over a book that had stalled.

I did. I enjoyed the process. It's nice to see my name on a book.

With that finished, though, I took a programming job in Portland. The company hired me mostly on my reputation, not just as a book reviewer and author, but as someone who knew quite a bit about programming. Those boring months spent waiting for something to break had paid off.

The CEO of the publishing company contacted me again with an idea for a very small, very quick book about the most controversial subject I'd reviewed until that point. I'd given a few talks about it and they thought I would do a fair job writing about it in a more formal setting.

The programming job wasn't working out very well at that point. It was a small company with ambitious goals but not enough funding to chase those goals. Instead, we had to work on less glamorous projects that paid better. It wasn't quite the right fit for me and I was having family problems then anyhow that made it difficult to concentrate.

Then I stumbled across the job listing for the publishing company. They had one job opening in California that matched my resume: they wanted someone with practical programming experience and good writing skills to edit their open source web site. My close friends all said that the job description described me. I applied.

On a trip to San Diego to meet with the CEO and an editor (to discuss the book idea) and the head of the online publishing department (to discuss the job), I scored a double-coup. They wanted me to do both. In fact, they liked me so much that they waived the requirement to move to California, allowing me to work from home as long as I agreed to visit the California office every couple of months to prove that I'm still alive.

I took the job. How could I refuse?

It's still funny to me to think that if it weren't for me panicking on graduation day, stumbling into a job that left me just enough free time to study interesting things, stumbling into another job that let me practice those things, and taking a summer off to do nothing of consequence, I wouldn't have built up the skills and interests and, most importantly, connections, to have found a job I enjoy so much. Sometimes I think of Annie Dillard's quote, "I no longer believe in divine playfulness."