Consulting Memories

These two songs bring back some vivid memories. Nervous, sweaty palms sitting in my soon to be beloved RAV in a furniture store parking lot. I hadn’t had a lot of interview experience and I just remember leaning back in my seat, breathing deeply as Rob Thomas and Sufjan Stevens washed over me, wandering what 9am would bring. Agoura Hills was grey and cold as traffic whizzed by on the 101, blurs through the tall wire and I desperately tried to remember everything I had read about the company. Little did I know then that I was a few minutes away from a two and a half year journey. A journey that seemed to last a lifetime at the time but now seems to have only lasted an incandescent moment, one that was one of the most rewarding, most frustrating, challenging and difficult experiences of my life.

Looking back on it now I wonder if I did the right thing, walking away from it all. Of course you tend to remember the good and forget the bad as with anything in the past. I know I wouldn’t give up that experience for anything but it still wasn’t quite for me. The team was mostly great, DD and MC providing their endless encouragements and patient leadership, CD with his erratic brilliance, SM with her mothering, SR providing the musical background, MD with his surfing tales and understated humour, DS being the most demanding boss I have ever had. I still remember sitting in my office and dealing with the unfamiliar sensation that I would miss most of my workmates when I moved on, a feeling I hadn’t had thus far in my working life.

The location was brilliant as well. Climbing the hills of Malibu, the ocean breaking in the background, golden sunshine breaking down the Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu Canyon drives past the houses of the rich and the famous. The chaparral and bush of southern California, the red earth roads and hard rocks of the trails I hiked. The characters were varied and interesting, Bob the contractor, gruff, father Christmasy but hugely knowledgeable, sweet talking the ladies at the City to get what I needed done, trying not to punch out the assholes at the City and County who were holding up my projects.

It was a great trip for those couple of years, being a bright shining star in that team, topping the company in productivity and earning quick promotions, closing out tough projects under pressure. Of course those are the good memories. And it takes some dredging to remember why I left. The 12 hour workdays, the constant requirement to keep running at high speed and keep billing out with no end in sight, the unyielding pressure to meet your minimums, the stress when there were a million things to do and the worse stress when there weren’t, the financial under appreciation and those hours stuck on the 101 in congealed traffic.

Most of all I remember the panic attacks in the morning, the nausea and insomnia, the drugs and pills to take the edge off living the American Dream. I think I made the right decision. Given the uncertainties I face now in making a living, I have my moments of doubts and weakness. But that trip in the end was not sustainable, it was not my niche.

Where that is though, I’m yet to find.

On being a whippersnapper

Despite being on the latter end of three decades on this planet, there is nothing like my field and the small town (weirdly enough it is small) to make me feel like a wet behind the ears consultant trying to Old Men of the world their job. I swear the last two crisis meetings I’ve had, the average age of the room must have been around 50 and I have more hair on my chest than all the heads in the room barring mine. Everybody seems to know of everyone else and leading meetings in such an old boys club is nerve-wracking.

What is surprising is how many of these people cannot think out of the box and how many keep turning to me to get things done. Now this doesn’t mean their bad at their jobs, the vast majority are excellent to a fault, but the bigger picture is something that seems to elude them. In a way it provides me with some comfort. I’ve never been the kind of person to want to specialize. The thought of being a dentist or mortgage broker or something similar scares the crap out of me, doing the same thing over and over again.

I need variety, on a large scale to keep me enthusiastic. Even in a job as varied as the consulting I do, things have started to pale. It might be the economy, the lack of big clients but things are boring now. Stressful and boring. Not a good combination, fingers crossed for a big fuck up of a project with a client looking to get shit done by spending money. Like a headache subdivision, in the coastal zone, in the mountains with a couple of access problems and pissed off county staff. Now that would make the stress worthwhile, for a bit longer.

I think I went off-topic there.

Out...out...out

There are times when the (almost) 10 years of struggle seems to condense and vanish into nothingness. When those six months and endless things to do seems so overwhelming before I start a new stage in life. A day of working my ass off, having requests and responses piled on top of me, surfing this site while stuck in a freezing office makes me want to just ball up and smash my LCD screen into smithereens. To scream..."I want out, out, out....get me the FUCK out of here...NOW!!"

But of course I don't...because it is only six months, because there is a lot to be done and I have...for the past 10 (or so) years...gotten up every day and done what I had to do to get here and move forward.

P.S. T and PP, you better not give me grief about that being emo...it's not...

How not to inspire me

Email 1 - "Reminder to all employees that Labor Day is NOT a holiday for us"
Email 2 - "Please see above"
Email 3 - "CEO is taking Monday off"

Fuck me...as I sit here the phone has not rung once (well it did ring once but it was a automated marketing call). All my consultants are gone...I'm tired as fuck, my head hurts, everyone else is either asleep or relaxing at home. I (and some of my poor coworkers) are the only ones suffering this shit out. Fuck loyalty...I want out. I want to go home, fuck this place and all in it.

Eight more months to gird my loins and stick this bullshit out. Fuck.

Am I crazy?

So I want to do a PhD. I really, really want to do one.

Why? As I have been asked by the tortured graduate students that I count amongst my friends. Many a time.

Well...I'm sick of the private sector. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind business. In fact I have a couple of entrepreneurial things in the works as it is. The thing is that I'm tired of this empty life. Working for rich people, making already rich people richer. While the rest of the world starves. I mean lets be frank I work in fucking Malibu. I'm a sell out. I harp on about sustainable development in the developing world while enjoying what is frankly a comfortable first world life surrounded by ipods and streaming video.

So I'm going to roll the dice.

A long time ago (well just over a year ago) I gave myself a deadline to go home or at least start doing something I believe in. I thought I was going to be late on that deadline, but it actually looks like I'll be within the set time. For one thing I've decided to forget about getting a black coloured passport. As easy as that would make travelling (with the exception of the Middle East) I think I'm going to stick with my red one.

Crazy? Quite possibly. I'm giving up a chance others have killed for, played lotteries for, died alone and cold in the cargo holds of ships for. And I'm giving it up...on the whisper of a chance. Note that I am building a backdoor, escape hatch into my plan...but that is a last, last resort. As I told the boys this weekend, I'd rather die broken and penniless in Lanka than driving a 7 series and living in a million dollar home here. I think the backdoor is less for me than the family..to salve their worry that I have finally lost my mind. Mind you I think that door was chosen for me when I was 8 and decided I wanted the heat of Colombo over the toys in the City of Angels.

My hand's clenched around the dice right now. I need to complete two years out here to make sure my CV isn't complete pants...and that means 10 more months of back breaking, soul sucking work...but I think I can make it. I'm researching PhD's with a fervour, trying to remember everyone who works in my field in SL, saving.

I need my life to have reason, to have a purpose. Come April, I'm going to do everything I can to stack the odds in my favour and then roll.

And hope for sixes.

I'm back

Right, so I'm back. The retirement lasted all of a couple of months (if that). For me the confusion needs an outlet, the million things to do, the grey areas, the love lost, found, lost again, the arguments, the sweet nothings, the backstabbings, the sunrises, the sunsets all need an outlet.

So if you thought I was emo before...be warned...you might want to place a bucket by you now. This is going to be personal, very personal. And I'm going to (try) steer clear of Sri Lankan politics or any soapboxes...well try.

So whats on my plate?

- Career: trying for a new job, as fun as this is, I think I need to move away from small projects to big ones. Still trying to think of something intelligent to say on my resume.
- PhD: I want to start one in 2010, I have an idea, its a brilliant one. I just need to sell it to a supervisor. Which of course means writing a proposal.
- Australia: where I want to do my said PhD. Where they actually give holidays...gasp...shock...horror (incidentally the 5th happiest country in the world.)
- Funding: needed for the PhD...must get my thinking hat on
- Citizenship: the only reason I've stuck it here for this long. More paperwork and applications.
- Studio: getting a business up and running is no easy task.
- The Girl: deserves a post all of its own. Suffice to say this is going to be the cause of a lot of emo posts (I wouldn't want to disappoint my fans)

That's about it. Now why the change?

Lets just say what happened at home changed me, didn't make me feel like I deserved my moniker. I'm still trying to adjust to the changes, becoming the de-facto head of a family without any of the accompanying security was not easy. It's like I'm in a pressure cooker now...and it's coming to boil...I just hope this will help vent it.

TLF had served it's purpose and had to go.

shin, shin to change.