Quitting work - the thoughts behind it

Like practically everyone else, I went to school, got good grades and got a job at the end of it. I was 17. At 17, to make the money I was making was absolutely fantastic – I wasn’t used to earning anything like the money you make when you start your first full-time job. I had earned enough to run my car and have a night out a week working at McDonald’s, which actually, when you’re 16, doesn’t pay too bad at all. But it’s an organization which has analyzed every component of the supply chain and optimized it to near perfection, including the humans who are operating the burger-making and cash-taking machines. It doesn’t take too long working there for you to realize that you do not want to eat their food.

I had been messing around with computers since I was a kid. I got a Commodore Vic20 for Christmas when I was 10 years old. My parents were skeptical about what I’d do with a computer – I’d been begging for one for ages – my father thought I’d just play games on it.

I never did. I wanted to learn how it worked, and after mastering BASIC (which, let’s face it, takes about a week), I moved onto what at the time was called “machine code”. The first book I ever bought for myself, when I was 11 years old, cost me 9.95 – it was called “Programming the 6502” by Rodnay Zaks. I had to save my pocket money for over 2 months to buy it, and I remember being told by my grandmother (who was staying with us at the time) that I was wasting my money. I didn’t really care though, because I knew that this book was going to give me all the information I needed to understand this mysterious world of op-codes and registers.

I was so naïve – I didn’t even know that you needed an assembler. I used to write my programs in assembly language, translate them manually into decimal by looking up the op-codes, then create a little program in BASIC to ‘poke’ the who program into memory, then run it. Absolutely amazing. I’ll not forget the first one that worked - I crashed my computer many, many times before I got it right and I had to type it all back in again – it scrolled a pixel across the screen from right to left. Wow.

I messed around with programming all the way through high school – I used to write programs that were an attempt to automate my homework, working out verb endings for French words in various tenses or calculating the chemical symbol for Calcium Carbonate for example, based on the valency of the components. I had no idea that this wasn’t going to be possible for anything past atomic number 20. And still don’t understand why, really.

So, then the career people start talking to you about what you’re going to do for a job. I knew that I didn’t really want to go to University – I was fed up with learning stuff - the idea was to take a “year out”. A small manufacturing company was looking for trainee programmers in a town near me, so I took their aptitude test. I heard that I apparently had aptitude, and was offered a job. I think at the time I was offered a job as a trainee in a bank too. How different life may have turned out if I had taken that path instead.

The trainee programmer job was in an office where I had to wear a suit and tie to work every day. The people in the office were at least 10 years older than me, and everyone smoked at their desk. All day, every day, the office was just a huge cloud of smoke containing programmers tapping away at their COBOL programs.

Going from next to nothing to a salaried job with a regular wage – I just didn’t know what I was going to do with all that money. It was about $15,000 a year. I still lived with my parents and gave them ‘rent’, but to be honest for the daily meals, laundry service, 24/7 access to a very comfortable house – the amount I paid was nothing.

I was about 9 months in that job, when I saw another job advertised about 30 miles away which was offering a lot more money. This was with a bank, still programming, but this time in mainframe assembler. I truly enjoyed that work. The programming itself was low level, incomprehensible to outsiders and the environment taught me a lot about software projects, self-organization and time management.

I moved jobs a few more times and eventually ended up as an IT consultant (see how that happens?!). The assignments often stressful, but I was well-liked, well-respected and was extremely well-paid.

But it was no longer fun. I was miserable. I looked forward to weekends when I didn’t have to go there. I hated Mondays. Workdays, I was up at 6:30am or earlier, rushing to work to start billing and start being miserable. A rushed lunch (too much work to do, too much time lost not billing), then back to meetings, deadlines, ridiculous rules, sycophants, brown-nosers, office politics and petty arguments.

About a year before I quit, I had made my decision to take a break. I had taken hardly any time off at all over the previous 10 years. It was time for an extended vacation.

Every Day Is Saturday: Day One - What to do?