(227/366) Follow your nose….and trust your heart

August 14, 2012 – I tried about a dozen things this evening, wasn’t happy with any of them. The shot was supposed to be of these really cool, super-old glasses of my Great-Uncle Jack. But then I turned and saw Loki, and the light, and his total ooziness in the sun just caught me instead.

I should have been packing, but I just felt like being out here in the sun with the cats. Sometimes you have to feed the need for a bit of relaxation before getting to the things you need to do.

I am off on some field work for a few days, along with the Director of our program and the manager of the group I work directly in. Off to the North, where I haven’t been for about four years, and am very much looking forward to it. And next week I am off to the Island for some lake sampling again, which means I can ride. Have I mentioned how much I love my job?

It’s so funny, when I first applied for this job, one person I knew said “Why would you want to go back to working FOR someone?!?” She obviously didn’t get it and how do you explain something to someone who already has a pre-formed opinion based on their own negative experience. Yes, I was self-employed, and yes, I made a lot of money and we cleared all of our debt as a result. But there were some thing I was after. Some of the obvious things were the stability of knowing what the income was for any given month. Financially I’d never had that since I pretty much always lived on scholarships and supplemented it with part time jobs, or always fretted about the next contract or how much the contractor was willing to part with that given month. And then there were the other benefits – a healthy paid vacation (and the ability to roll over up to six weeks into the following year – meaning once could easily amass 9 weeks of regular vacation), paid overtime or time off in lieu (obvious choice for me is the time off), paid time for family emergencies (that came in handy in May!), a volunteer day each year, a personal day each year, and the ability to take a year off without pay once in your career and come back to the security of your job. Much like a sabbatical. Then there are the full medical and dental benefits, the pension, the gym in the building, really flexible work hours, and the ability to take courses of relevance and interest – paid for if agreed upon. Missing from my life was something that I had enjoyed when working in a team environment, both at UBC and at Malaspina – the camaraderie of a group working together towards similar goals. I currently work in a very small team of six people, we all have our specialties, and all work very well together. We can speak our minds, and there is a really amazing support for each other. And the rest of the people in the sister groups are equally great to work with. So if all the other stuff wasn’t enough, the social aspect of the job is phenomenal.

When I was self employed I worked like a dog, my work days were often 12-18 hours long. I was alone most of the time, at my home office or on the road in hotels. I relied only on myself, because I was paid to produce. And there was nothing wrong with any of that as I was paid handsomely to do so and I was very successful at what I did, and I made all the inroads that help me do my job now. But there was something missing. A disconnect.

When I finally landed this position that I had been after for so long, friends laughed and said “You’ll hate it!” The standing joke was that I really hadn’t ever worked full time through a summer, that I’d lived a life where I could take whatever day I wanted to off. True, but if I took that day off I had no income to show for it.

And you know what? Even with this position, not much has really changed, except that now I can take time off and not lose income. Summer is the quiet time, most facilities have next to no fish on site. Releases are mostly in the spring, although coho are carried through the summer. Adult work doesn’t start in most facilities until late August – September. So everyone takes vacations and uses up their overtime bank in the summer. And with my flexible work week, I take every second Friday off, and can flip them around if a holiday lands on a different Monday, or something is happening and I want a different weekend to be my three day weekend.

I do still work very hard – harder than I did before – I travel a lot to the same facilities I did as a contractor, and some of the work is still around the same project I worked on while on contract (seemed logical for me to take on that project since I did all the ground work). The difference now is that I have the ability to do things I didn’t before. Before I was paid to gather and produce. Now I am paid to do all that, but also to learn, investigate, liaise, and advise – and all in a really worthwhile organization that is socially, economically, culturally, environmentally, and ecologically of great importance to my Province and with people who are amazingly passionate about what they do. Yeah, that feels awesome!

When I was out with my Uncle, his daughter, and her boyfriend last night, it fascinated me that she “got it” at a young age. She said that when she was at University one of her courses was in building one’s own theatre company. By the end of the course they had a full package to go out and start their own business. And with the years of professional experience she already had under her belt, she had already decided that there was no way she wanted to have her own business, she’d rather have the ability to do the fun stuff, and not have to deal with the headaches of the “other” stuff. When I laughed and said I totally understood, my Uncle piped up and said “And in your case, it has a great social and environmental impact. Doubly rewarding.”

It’s why I wanted this particular job for so long. There is only one other job out there that would ever pull me away from this one.

The one other thing I love about my current position is the nature of the people. I was telling Kirk about a woman who just returned from a year off for maternity leave and was saying how nice she is. Kirk laughed and said “You’ve never said that anyone you work with there is anything BUT nice!” And it’s true! I always hated going through the ‘touchy feely’ interviews, but now I actually understand them a bit better. They are designed to find the characters that fit together and will work well as a team. And it really works. It’s really fabulous to work in an environment where the emphasis is on the program and not on individual achievement where petty jealousies can breed animosity.

The clock is ticking, the job has an end date, and even though everyone makes comments about “they have to keep you on” it’s not ultimately up to the people I work wit,h or directly under, because of the nature of the government environment right now. If the end date really ends up being the end, I can say that I’ve had a fabulous year and a half, learned a ton, and even though I’ve worked really hard, I was also afforded the chance to work with some amazing people, and have a lot more relaxation time in there than I did when I was self employed.

I should probably stop relaxing and rambling and go pack now….

And by the way…how on earth is is the 15th of August tomorrow?!?!