Career Changes

Hello, blog-readers!  Jenn posted last month about her Happiness Project.  Well, I’m working on one, too!  It’s kind of a rough draft, scribbled onto the back of a strip of paper I took off the fridge, but it’s coming along.  There will be more on my Happiness Project later as I flesh it out, but one of my goals is to post on the blog more often, for as you can see it’s been awhile since I’ve been active!

Last spring we announced our big plan to sell our house and move to North Carolina, but I’ve come up with another big change, for me at least: a career change.

This has been a long time coming.  It’s not that I hate my job, it’s really a pretty good one overall, but I’m in a career that I don’t love, or even really like, outside of getting paid.

How did I wind up here?  My path to where I am right now as a plumbing/fire protection designer at Harriman is kind of a bumpy, windy road.  Back in the early 90’s when I was in my early teens, I really wanted to be a computer programmer.  What I really wanted to do was program video games.  I graduated high school in ’96 and started the Computer Science course at USM the following fall.  My first freshman year at USM taught me that I really didn’t want a career messing with computers.

The first problem I had was with computers in general.  At that time, Windows 95 Home PCs were hitting there full stride invading American middle-class households, and the home internet revolution was still pretty young.  In other words, computers at the time were kind of a pain in the ass (much more so than now), and I found myself having to mess around with autoexec.bat’s and config.sys’s and the like on a regular basis just during my personal home use.

The second problem was that I didn’t really want to sit at a computer figuring out code all day.  I’m pretty detail-oriented, and I could do it fairly well, but it’s tedious and mind-numbing.

The third problem was a combination of USM computer professors and the ever-changing landscape of technology.  You see, 1996 was a big year for the computing curriculum at USM.  This was the year that the courses would shift focus from one programming language to another (from PASCAL to C++).  I had taken an AP course in PASCAL during my senior year of high school in preparation for college, and I had loved it.  As it turns out, I don’t love C++.  Really, I didn’t love having to start from scratch with something new.  This also seemed to throw off the professors who only appeared to know just enough to teach the day’s class, and weren’t very knowledgable when asked questions they weren’t expecting.

My Dad suggested that I try Electrical Engineering.  I didn’t know much about it, but I felt like I needed to do something to avoid having minimum wage jobs all my life.  To further help inspire me, I spent that summer working at Wal-Mart, which I hated.  In retrospect, I think 33-year-old me could have handled the job a lot better than 19-year-old, fat, lazy me, but it still wasn’t my calling.  So come September 1997, I excitedly started the Electrical Engineering program at USM.  I liked it, more at first than when I graduated.  By the end of it, I was really burnt out.  It also turns out that all of the things I liked best and had the greatest aptitude for (digital logic and robotics) weren’t too useful in the real world, especially in Maine.  It turns out that there weren’t all that many jobs available for the stuff I didn’t like as well.

The year 2000 had seen a boom in local electrical engineering jobs.  In 2001, the year I graduated with my BS, it dropped sharply.  I tried getting hired at a few places, and then decided to take the summer off and see if things would be better in the fall ( because I was good at being lazy).  Of course, September brought 9/11 and knocked our economy into a slump and it was even harder to find a job.

Finally, in Septemeber 2002 after tons of interviews, and resume mass mailings, I had a bite from a random resume mailing.  It was a two-year-old 4-person Electrical Engineering/Electrician company called Martens & Abbott, and they hired me (and a bunch of others, bringing it to 10 people).  The type of work they did was electrical, but unlike what I had studied, it was all construction-related.  While I was job hunting I had taken a 3-day AutoCAD course, and it paid off, as I did a lot of blueprint drawing.

In 2003, the work dried up and I got put on part-time.  By spring of 2004, I was barely working a couple hours a week.  I was told that there was more work coming (but I’d still be part time) so I managed to find another part-time job doing almost the same thing, so I could have two part-timers.  Well the work never came from Martens & Abbott, and a couple years later they closed their doors.

Work did boom for awhile at the new company, A2Z CADD drafting, which was a 2-person company (including me).  My boss and only coworker had a BS and experience in Mechanical Engineering (still construction related) and was going to be getting a bunch of electrical work, which is where I would come in.   We ended up getting much less electrical work than anticipated, so he trained me to do mechanical drafting.

In October of 2005, my Dad (who is in construction) was working on a school with a firm called Harriman which does architecture and every form of engineering.  I’d applied there for an electrical job twice and never even got to the interview stage.  They told him they needed someone to do mechanical drafting full-time, and I didn’t want to live with my parents into my 30’s, so I took my newfound mechanical drafting experience and decided to apply.  They hired me pretty quickly and trained me to do plumbing and fire protection drafting and design. At the six-month mark (to the day) I was given my first of many of my own projects, almost all of them supermarkets.

So now it’s 6 years later, October 2011.  I gave that long-winded backstory of my employment history to illustrate one thing: I’m not really doing what I want to do.  I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but I have NO desire to continue.  14 years ago, I decided to try something my father suggested, which mutated into like 3 others things based on what was available at any given time and what would make me the most money.  In other words, fate has pretty much guided me, and not the other way around.

But what do I want to do?  I’d really been thinking about going into business doing something that coincided with my interests.  I did some serious consideration regarding a bed & breakfast, and opening my own personal training/weight coaching business.  Then Jenn suggested that I open a toy store in Wilmington, and everything just sort of clicked.

I’m going to own my own toy store, or at the very least something in the kids/nerds catering genre.  It’ll be small, it’ll be a lot of work, and alot of business training/education will be needed, but I have set my sights on 2014 as the year my toy store will open.  I sent in my form to file my PE exam application as in active yesterday, and I take my first business seminar in about 3 weeks!  There are TONS of free resources available in Wilmington, both on their city website and at their local community college, so I’ve got plenty of opportunity!

I’ll be working on this tirelessly as I perform some other job in Wilmington, and then when 2014 comes around, I’ll be going into business for myself!  Hope that anyone reading this will come by!