Directions

Greetings.

This is one of my thought processes pieces if you do not want to read about the workings of my mind or my origin story leave now. I will try not to let this become a whining entry like I wrote last fall.

I am currently following a lead from a former coworker. It is a lead that has a reasonable chance of getting me a contract. That is the good news, the devil is in the details. It would be the same old, same old. Another job looking at rocks in some nowhere place working too many days in a row to be good for the head. I am following the lead because I can not afford to not take a contract. A trip to the Yukon will only be cool for the first few days and then the drudgery and the cold will sink in.

So its clear that I want to do some thing other then exploration geology. Hell I never planned on getting into that industry, I had class mates who did that field was a very deliberate choice. I stumbled into it. I took a job in my second year in my program it paid good. Then at the end of my program too tired of school to want to take on grad school I took a lead from my economic geology prof and landed myself a job in the Territories.

The job lasted two and a half years, it did me well, and got me out of being poor for a while. I was insecure and did not make any effort at looking for another job. I was also young and thought that loyalty to a firm mattered. This was not a path most people I knew or even me self expected from me.

The default position or opinion held by the people around me was that I would go in to grad school. Class mates that had worked in more cooperate settings commented that my temperament did not fit what they had seen, I chose research projects out of curiosity not practicality and I would have had the full support of the people I knew on faculty. Hell I had more grad school contacts in my last years then I did in industry.

I sat baffled as friends talked about having competing job offers, while I throw my resume in to the black hole of the internet for nothing.

So great was my ignorance when I over heard someone in my class talk about the salary he was negotiating, I was surprised by the notion you could negotiate a salary.

The situation now is somewhat better. I am more diversified, I have experience, but I don't feel as optimistic as I would like. The upgrading I did at BCIT so far has only landed me a very small number of ultimately unsuccessful interviews, the jobs I am getting reenforce the old trends its not the happiest of things.

This is not about me being globally unhappy, which is not the case. The one thing that was gained from BCIT with certainty was, in the absence of very strong personal ties to the interior, Vancouver is where I want to be. A shout out to the Skeptics in the pub people and the folks in East Van that I run into regularly for reenforcing that choice. Nor is the situation hopeless or stagnant. My resume is being sent to a professional should produce more polished document. Taking a different friends advice I have engaged in dialog with a recruitment agency.

At the end of the day, the easy jobs are the ones I don't but end up taking because at some point the money gets too low. Now I know I don't need to work non stop in that field to support my current standard of living but I want to be able to think beyond the basement suite.

The question I ask me self daily, is what can a person of average intellect, a generalist science education and moderate tech literacy do. I am confident that living in Vancouver is the out come I want to have after that I am less and less certain as time goes on.