My life’s been busy lately with friends and some work. In between the bursts of activity, I’ve had the chance to do some thinking.
Last week, we took a tech support job for a guy who is starting up a new ad agency and needed his Mac upgraded to OSX and all his apps upgraded accordingly. Didn’t seem like such a horrible job. Seemed pretty straightforward, actually. But that was not the case. The job turned into a long, drawn-out technical nightmare that has ended up almost losing us money on the deal. In the midst of trying to get the Mac to comply, I discovered that I really, truly am not the least bit interested in doing support any more. It’s boring, it’s hard to predict how long the job will take with OSX (unlike OS9, where I could estimate a job and be within 1/2 hour) and I just plain don’t like it.
It’s not like this is a new realisation. I’ve known for some time that I only take support jobs for the money, but this time, I felt actively unhappy with the experience. It wasn’t just that the Mac was being a bitch, or that the job was gonna run, oh, about 10 hours longer than expected. No, it was just the ACT of sitting there, waiting on installers, waiting for a restart or trying to deal with 2 operating systems that obviously were not intending to play nice. It was the knowledge that when it was said and done, I’d make about half my rate due to these fuck ups. The fuck ups that I could do absolutely NOTHING about. They were out of the blue with no explanation – which many of the OSX problems are. How can I support an OS with oddball crap like this? How can I arrange my life around doing work that may take 4 hours or 14? How can I ethically bill a client for all the extra time when I told him in the bid that it would be around XX hours, yet it’s 4 times that?
These are the questions I wrestle with during this month of shit, shit and more shit. This month has sucked ass from start to end. My NEW cell phone is defective, my work has sucked, my web stuff has been sucky and uninspired, it goes on and on. Bleh.
What to do? I feel like I need a change. I feel in a rut. Perhaps I just need a vacation. Some sand and Gulf breezes may be just the ticket.
But I dunno if a vacation will do it, either. I’m put out with everything. The jobs, the house, my friends, my family, all of it. Maybe it’s burnout? What I do know is that this week I intend to lay low. The only contact with humans will be for my Crescent Moon crap tomorrow. Nothing else. I’m obligated to do dinner with a friend that’s moving away Thursday night, but that’s it until the weekend.
::sigh:: This is my life or something like it. :-/