Made Up My Mind

It's a glorious day, Feb 17, 2006. It sure didn't start out that way. Sure the sun was shining and the geese .. whatever they do.. the wind was blowing.. you get the idea. Anyways, I woke with a start, having dreamt that my energy sector stocks were tumbling and that my ROTH IRA account was now 6k less than what I started at the beginning of the month. If that doesn't jarr one from sleep I don't know what will.

So the routine begins. Roll off the bed, onto the floor, and waited for brain to wake up. Ten minutes later, I couldn't resist the curiousity so the little Dell is turned on. After verifying I have not lost my shirt off my back, the attention was turned to the fridgid whether and the depressing news of global warmer. Great... NYC and part of FL will be underwater some time within this century.

Buy land in the midwest!

I have been setting 3 alarms recently. First one goes off at 3:30 AM.. why? to get up and do work. 2nd one goes off at 7 AM. Why? Incase I slept through the 3:30 AM alarm. The last one is set to buzz at 8 AM. Why? Cuz this is the absolutely must wake up time.

Once or twice I did wake up at 3:30 to do work. Actually got more done in those hours. Away from flashing sametimes and brain numbing tv shows. I did not look foward to waking up. There's the first internal design review to go over this morning. At 8:30 AM, I was still checking out news and articles on the web. I've been doing that a lot lately. Trying to find stuff other than work to occupy my time. Doing design for these new functionalities have been like pulling out ingrown hair, all over the back. It's painful and you can't really get around to it. Then it hits me again, that feeling of being trapped and that there's little you can do. I didn't like that feeling and the thought of working on code design and developing code just makes me miserable thinking about it.

So that was it.. call it 6 year long spontaneous decision, call it a cop-out, call it finally finding the courage, whatever it is, I have made up my mind. It's time to make my exit from Big Blue. For real this time.

I was checking stock forums, but that lead to scouring the posts in Ask The Headhunter from The Motley Fool. The article Taking A Salary Cut To Change Careers had 2 analogies for the situation. A particular one, that although was not on the top of my list of cons, ever the practical one, it's always on my mind.

1 - Think of a tree. The branches of the tree represent the paths that you take. The article talks about climbing up this one particular branch and looking around you find out that this is not the direction you wanted to take or it's coming to a dead end ahead. Eventually you know you are going to have to turn around or just be stuck there up on a branch that's not leading you anywhere. So in order to do that, you have to come down, retrace your steps, prehaps start all the way over to the lowest level the trunk of the tree. But you gotta take that step before you can climb over to a new branch.


2 - The second analogy is something I can definitely relate to - Stocks!
Cut your losses early on or else the price gets costlier.


Well we are on the topic of analogies, why not bring up Who Moved My Cheese again? Yes, so there's the 3rd analogy.


3 - Someone moved the cheese from usual position in the mouse maze. One mouse decided to venture into the unknown to look for that cheese while the other just waited around to see if the cheese will come back.



Message to take away is that, yah, it's going to be rough to start over or to venture into the unfamiliar territory. But that's all part of the process to find that thing you find most rewarding.


So, what's the plan? Not 100% sure, but I will be trying my hands to get into more of the writing field. In the meantime picking up odds and ends jobs, prehaps one of those on the Stepping Stones article. Companies such as Starbucks or Whole Foods that offer medical benefits after working something like 400 hours.. avg 20 hours a week.

Something.. there will always be projects and deadlines which should've been completed yesterday. Do I feel bad that the project will be lacking some resources to finish it? A little.. but whose fault would it be if everything hinges on one person? Esp in a company as big as IBM? It would be arrogant and egocentric of me to think that the division will not be able to survive without me. Sure, they might be in a bind for couple of weeks. But they'll recover soon enough. If they don't then managment really need to think hard about relying too much or putting too much weight on a single entity. Listen to me.. entity. .. dam technical mumble jumble.

Long story short, been in IT/progamming/consulting/configuration/programming field for about 6 years now.. from co-ops to interns to corporate. Time to make a move. Got friends who got engaged, to getting married, to having baby #1, and now baby #2. After 6 years, I filled the apt full with just stuff.. most of it just paper lying around, got my instruments that I haven't learned how to play yet. That's it.. 6 years. Sure there has been good days. Most of the people I've met throughout these years have been my only source of human interaction. Work for the most part monopolized my time. My bad for letting work to take over my personal time. I didn't speak up, I didn't make a fuss and a ruckus. Stupid me, I just buried my head and tried to do the best I can. But that was just incredibly foolish of me. Six years have passed and I have not made a single stride.

I don't know how long it'll take me to find the job I am looking for, but I am looking toward the change, and I will make it.