The pre 30 depression
Thursday, April 16, 2009Yep, tomorrow will be the day when I’ll, as Romanians (and maybe others) say, change the prefix. I’m sure I’ll add a post to mark this glorious occasion, but for now I want to vent in a more negative voiced entry about stuff that I’ve been thinking about lately.
Looking back at the last 10 years, I haven’t accomplished that much. I started as a kid and ended as kid, at least at heart. The greatest breaktrough was getting a partner in life to whom I’m grateful beyond words for being there and helping me through some fairly tough times. Thank you, Ioana.
The other good thing was that I advanced professionally, but this is partly overshadowed by the fact that I have a dead end job right now. Question: Where do I advance from the position of Intranet developer in a construction company? Answer: Nowhere, really. I can’t really hope for a raise either, because they say it’s the recession (although we have way more work than last year) and they taught us to be silent and happy that we still have the job we have. And to be honest this place still pays me very well, much better than any purely web oriented company would pay me in this shithole of a town. I’ve been also thinking about freelancing again, but I read some articles on FreelanceSwitch these days and I remembered all too well the painful facets of being a freelancer. Plus in the summer of 2007 when I struggled to get a job because I was deep in crap, I promised myself I’ll never get into sticky situations like that again. Basically I recognized that freelancing is not for me. My plans for the near future include trying to sell products via the web but that might end in a fiasco too, due to the fact that my commercial skills are next to none.
So what remains to be done is to keep the 8 - 5 (lunchbreak included) and work a little extra in the afternoon in my so called free time. When I’m in the mood that is. Fortunately the after 5 work is usually of the pleasant type with small exceptions. One of these exceptions was a cute little file sharing site which I’ve built for myself after years of working for others. I’ve launched it after working on it for about half a year and it was all good until the person who was my trusty client for 8 years started sabotaging me in ways I could’ve never imagined because this site happened to offer the same functionality as one of his. Suddenly we weren’t friends anymore. It felt great… But to return to more pleasant things I should mention here that there are two persons in my after 5 o’clock life who I love to work with. The first one is Lucian, the one who always gets cool projects on the table and manages the client front like a hero and the other one is Alin, my casual designer, the one that I can always count on when I need a logo, an icon, a rounded corner or even a whole site’s design.
Another dark spot in my life is my family. As I don’t have a family of mine yet when I say family I refer to my parents. I don’t really want to talk about this now but if you read this blog this year you might know that this facet of my life is wreck. And it’s not going to get better. On the contrary.
There are many other things I’m not pleased with and the question that pops up is: what’s worth living for then? Well, beside said partner in life there are the small pleasures. I won’t make a list because I’d surely forget something but there are things that put a smile on my face and for which I should be really grateful. And I usually am.
Re-reading this post I realized that it turned out to be mostly about work, but that’s sort of normal. After all that’s the thing I do most of the time. And will be doing it for many more years…