Blatant Optimism

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November 02, 2003

Soon, all this will be over...

I'm changing jobs again. Off to Granada to do interesting iTV, Web and Mobile things for a bit. It's a short term contract, very short term, but it should be interesting. It's a company going through a lot of changes at the moment, but they're also VERY good on the business side of things. Lots to be learnt. Which is the upside.

On the downside, however, I'm facing an increasingly uncertain financial position, at a time when my about-to-grow family needs me to be Very Secure Indeed.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are quite a few interesting jobs out there. And the market is in *sooooooo* much better shape than it was six months ago when I first left the beeb. But, as the saying has been in our house recently, we're looking forward to things 'getting back to normal'.

While at MTV I got chatting to a lovely director called Nat. He'd had his first kid around three years ago, and we were comparing notes. "The thing is," he said to me, "after the first one I knew there would be a bit of upset for about six to nine months, and then things would settle down again."

"Of course", I said, reaching for another glass of wine.

"But then my wife got pregnant again, so we had all the build-up to that, and we were straight into the next nine-months of upset to our lives."

"Ah", said I. There had been a lot of glasses of wine. I wasn't capable of great wit at this point. In fact, I'm suprised I've remembered this much. Anyway, he went on:

"And then, about two-and-a-half years later, I realised that this was it. It wasn't going to go back to how it was before. This was the new normal."

And that's kind of how I feel now. This is the new normal. And to be honest it's probably a really good thing. I mean, lets take an extremely pessimistic and critical view of the events of recent years:

• Six months of putting my life on hold doing things that let me off far too lightly while I waited for a job that then didn't turn up.
• Two months getting really really stressed about having taken on a sales job I couldn't do.
• Three months of trying to find a really well-paid job in an absolutely dead employment market, while the mortgage happily drank my redundancy money.
• Being made redundant from a job that I'd only just turned into a real success, just as I was buying a house I could hardly afford.
• Eighteen months of trying to set up a business unit and build a team that another really powerful part of my employers really didn't want to exist.
• At the same time having my first house turn into a nightmare that felt like a prison.
• Six months of trying to turn a fledgeling unit into a mighty empire, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath me at the last minute.
• Six months of running about 8 sites on skeleton staff and never being at home, lest I and my two other staff members get laid off.
• Eighteen months of frantic saving, working 18-hour days, 7 days a week, to get out of our rented house before the property ladder slipped by us.

So you look at all that, covering the last - oooh - five years, and say, "So which normal exactly was it that you wanted to go back to?"

Posted by Tom Dolan at November 2, 2003 01:06 AM

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Posted by: Euan at November 2, 2003 08:52 AM

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