Its been ten years since I had permanent, full time employment...
There were a bunch of factors that led up to my "change in employment status", and in my change in employment outlook. The main factors were that Id been having a more and more stressful time at my job working as a team manager for a higher management that was becoming more insecure, and less technically relevant... and that was coupled with a sudden downturn in the Tech industry and the foreshadow of the big economic crisis of 2008.
And so in early 2007 I was unemployed and frankly, relieved to be!
And after wandering around the Americas for about a year, and having "the time of my life" just spending time introspecting and without commitment, I "landed" back in Vancouver, but still with out much of a "plan". And at that point, I was approached by someone from my old employer (but in a different functional group) about doing some contract work for them... I was happy enough to take them up on the offer because I needed some income but wasn't at all sure what kind of "career" or full-time role I wanted... And it worked out well...
And that more or less led me to my "lifestyle" of the last 10 years with periods of contract work (with minimal responsibilities other than the quality of my own work) interspersed with long solo trips to remote and interesting places.
... And its been a great lifestyle but one suitable only for someone like me, with solid financial status, no dependents, and a well developed ability to spend most of my time alone and without social support/interaction.
But, as I'm sure anyone reading my blog babble has thought and noted, I do feel significant stress on a pretty regular basis (though it is on a long time cycle of every few years rather than every few months or weeks). Its the price of the lifestyle... Contract work is not always available conveniently when I want to be working... and the situation gets harder to manage as I get older and am "less employable" as viewed by employers who don't already know me.
And so I find myself considering my options.
And over the past six months Ive been working (on contract again) in the same group and with the same people who I was working with 10 years ago when I was last employed full-time.
And it turns out the group is needing to grow again,
And it seems they have a bit of a "gap" in their succession planning with no current employees being senior enough to step up to a full project management role...
And there is currently a dearth of available senior electrical engineers here in the Vancouver area.
And my work friends from the past, who are all managers now them-selves, look at me and say , "Hey why don't you come back and manage this new project with us?"...
Hmmmm.
And so I consider what the job would be like...
And I think back and I remember what it was like working as an Engineering group manager last time...
With project schedules that constantly slip-out at the start and intermediate dates but don't slip at the end dates, and with upper management who constantly ask for reworked schedules that are "accurate and detailed" down to a day or two of granularity over a period of six months with a team of 8-10 people ... Completely ridiculous for a an Engineering Validation team whos job it is to find unknown bugs in hyper complex systems, with limited documentation; and when we find the bugs we have to investigate and find resolutions for them too... But it has to fit in that "fixed" schedule of course!
This is all nothing new though... Its always been the same irrational story... Its called "being a manager" in pretty much any Engineering company.
And I see my friends who as I said are now experienced managers, and I look at them and think "wow, those guys are so competent at whet they do, they are way better at it than I ever was!" And I see how stressed they get by the conflicting demands on them. And I remember how that stress level made me "an angry person" all the time!... And I'm wondering why would I want to do that to myself again??
But I'm also thinking that well, yeah, nothing has changed in 10 years... The system is the same with the same faults and strength and I did it once and I can do it again. Its a forgone conclusion that "I'm gonna get burned" by the company's irrational schedule management systems...
But I'm older and wiser now; and I know I'm gonna end up as "the bad guy" in the schedule meetings! I know they are irrational!... I know I cant change them to plan better!
And if I know all this, then when the "finger of blame" starts getting waved around by people, and they direct it at me, I know I don't have to take it personally... But I also know that its oh-so-easy to sit back and say "I wont be affected by other peoples opinions" while I'm imagining the future and am not actively embedded in the situation... I know that that "outlook" will not last more than a few minutes when I'm actually experiencing it! :)
... And so I'm weighing my options... The insecurity of contracting, The increasing difficulty of getting work as a low-level Engineer as I get older. The guaranteed high stress levels of going back into a management role, but the secure and higher income of the job...
And Ive come to my conclusion...
I'm gonna take the shitty stressful Engineering Manager job!
The overview of the plan is that Ill take the job and help my friends out for a few years... But I intend to do it only for 3-4 years. Im gonna take the bigger pay cheque and the constant employment and squirrel the money away for the next few years so that I can "secure my retirement". After that I hope to be in a position to never "have to have employment" again!... I can work if I want, but only if I want :)
In the mean time though I know I'm gonna have a less than relaxing few years... I'm gonna try really hard not to take things personally when things get rough at work (as they of course will). And I'm gonna work at bringing a couple of their current mid-level engineers up to full speed to be able to take-over my role as soon as possible. I'm hopefully gonna be contributing to a project that I feel is worthwhile and "adding something positive to our world" (though there is never any guarantee of that). I'm gonna definitely be aiming to do a good job for my team and help them each grow in the way they want to at work (and that is always "contributing something positive to the world").
And well, that's the hope. And that's what I'm gonna be doing for a while...
Signing employment papers next week (or so they tell me).
Lets see what happens ... Life is always a wild ride :))
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Paid to Slide
A couple of months back, not long after the start of the Skeleton season up at Whistler, I got a call from one of my sliding buddies (Matt). He wanted to know if I was interested in helping out with a film project that was looking for some skeleton athletes. It was just going to be a few days work but it needed to happen very promptly and they were looking for some sliders to help out.
At the time I had just started a work contract after more than eight months without any work at all, so I was certainly interested in a little extra money... though at this stage I had no idea what the pay grade might be.
Now I'm not actually a particularly gifted skeleton athlete (way too old and slow to be competitive), and though I can happily slide from the top of the Whistler track with any kind of ice conditions (even most experienced sliders will not start from the top of the Whistler track because its so fast and powerful...dangerous), I would not have thought that Id be on anyone's list for being paid to do it!
But it turns out there were some "extenuating circumstances" that made the difference:
1) It was very early in the season and there were very few of us sliding at Whistler at the time.
2) The project needed people who could slide from the top of the whistler track
3) It needed to happen within about two weeks
4) They needed three sliders, all with similar build and size .. So we all look like the same slider when we have our helmets on. (because we can each only do about 6 runs a day from the top of the track before we get "sled head (concussion issues), and they need as many runs for shooting as possible.
So, there were some phone calls made and there were some slight adjustments to my working week so I could take an extra day for the weekend of "shooting", and I was able to confirm that I could do what they needed, when and where they needed it. And after that there was some running around to get some custom spandex suits made up (nothing fancy, just a plain blue so that all three sliders looked the same) and some documents were emailed around and signed and emailed around some more... And now I officially have an "Agent" for the film industry!
It turned out that they couldn't manage to get three local sliders who looked similar enough, so they ended up getting one of the sliders from over in Calgary (Mark) to fly out here to Whistler for the shoot.
Now, of the three of us, I was definitely the "third string", so I was only going to need to be on set for the actual shooting days, which was fine by me cos the other guys are definitely better sliders than I am, and I can only get a bit of extra time off work to do this.
So, about a week or so after the first call I find myself up at the sliding track early in the morning while the film crew with all their equipment and trucks and people and catering services etc are running around the place doing their thing...
The project that we are filming is for promotional material for a Virtual Reality experience being put together by one of the large Asian electronics corporations (they have viewing goggles and 360degree video cameras that they want to sell to the consuming masses). The theme of the project is the VR experience of Skeleton sliding, which seems like a good idea to me since it really is an adrenalin rush to do it but its way too inaccessible for most people due to the need for training and access to the very few tracks in the world... And its all intended to coincide roughly with the upcoming Winter Olympics in Jan 2018 which will of course be the peak of the general publics interest in such odd activities as Bobsleigh and Skeleton... So that gives them about a year to take the raw footage from the shoot and do all the CGI and post production work that is needed.
In slightly greater detail, the intent is that the "experience" will start out with a regular entry to a skeleton run (run along the ice with the sled, then lunge forward at a sprint to land on the sled and start taking the steeply banking corners of the track as the speed builds... and then they want to get a little "creative", so there are going to be lots of coloured lights and the rider will kind of leave the reality of the sliding track and head off into a virtual reality ride through a psychedelic universe??? or something like that, and after a minute or so of that, they will come back onto the real world track and the coloured lights will fade away and the run will end at the bottom of the track.
Right so that's the intent, and the riggers are running around stringing up all sorts of coloured lights in the track and really, all there is for me to do is mostly sit around and wait till they need me to do a run. Oh, and when we do a "run" we have to wear the camera rig... Which isn't as bad as it could be. The rig is an aluminium back plate with about a 20cm high post in the middle of it and on top of the post is a collection of 4 or 5 small camera cubes (very much like GoPro cameras but with better lenses) arranged to get a full 360 degree view of the run and record it in high def'...
We sliders had some concerns about that post sticking up because it could really cause injuries if we accidently rolled over during the run, but after a couple of tentative early test runs, we figured itd be OK because the tech people on the film crew found that we went too fast for them to get good definition in the video... so they wanted us to go as slow as possible... So if we were going to be going really slow (and slow is about 110kmh-120kmh) then there was virtually no way we could crash :)
So, in order to go slow, the track crew (who look after the ice on the track) just let the frost build up on the track for a couple of days (which really slows us down when we slide).
The only other tricky part of the whole thing was that the camera rig weighed a couple of kilograms, has a significant wind resistance, and it isn't centred on the sled... With it sitting between our shoulders, its about 40cm forward of the balance point, and when we are going 100Kmh, that smallish object (10cmx10cmx10cm) actually has a lot of wind resistance...just try sticking your hand out of a car window at 100kmh and you can feel how much force it generates. The trick with that is that the weight wants to tip the sled forward (unstable), but the drag which only comes into play as the speed builds up, wants to tip the sled backwards. So for the first section of the track we are unstable and tipped forward but for the second half we are overstable and tipped back... It would make for a terrible run on fast ice but since we were on very slow ice we could manage it without too much bother.
So, for a couple of days I hung around at the track and watched filmy people do their "shooting" thing and occasionally Id get to do a run on the track with very slow ice and all sorts of fancy coloured strobing flouro' and LED lighting... (I have to say the lighting was really quite good and I wish we could keep the track lit up like that all the time :)) ) But it was actually quite boring most of the time. As I said though, I was the third string slider and I think I got only about 6 runs in two days ... about half as much as the other two guys.
But I felt it was well worth the experience, and a few weeks later I got a cheque in the mail for several thousand dollars for my efforts! I was super pleased with that since it has effectively paid for all my equipment and sliding runs for the last three years and fuel costs for the last couple of years :))
So now, if anybody needs me for something filming related, I can just ask them to contact "my agent" I guess :)
...my stardom awaits!
At the time I had just started a work contract after more than eight months without any work at all, so I was certainly interested in a little extra money... though at this stage I had no idea what the pay grade might be.
Now I'm not actually a particularly gifted skeleton athlete (way too old and slow to be competitive), and though I can happily slide from the top of the Whistler track with any kind of ice conditions (even most experienced sliders will not start from the top of the Whistler track because its so fast and powerful...dangerous), I would not have thought that Id be on anyone's list for being paid to do it!
But it turns out there were some "extenuating circumstances" that made the difference:
1) It was very early in the season and there were very few of us sliding at Whistler at the time.
2) The project needed people who could slide from the top of the whistler track
3) It needed to happen within about two weeks
4) They needed three sliders, all with similar build and size .. So we all look like the same slider when we have our helmets on. (because we can each only do about 6 runs a day from the top of the track before we get "sled head (concussion issues), and they need as many runs for shooting as possible.
So, there were some phone calls made and there were some slight adjustments to my working week so I could take an extra day for the weekend of "shooting", and I was able to confirm that I could do what they needed, when and where they needed it. And after that there was some running around to get some custom spandex suits made up (nothing fancy, just a plain blue so that all three sliders looked the same) and some documents were emailed around and signed and emailed around some more... And now I officially have an "Agent" for the film industry!
It turned out that they couldn't manage to get three local sliders who looked similar enough, so they ended up getting one of the sliders from over in Calgary (Mark) to fly out here to Whistler for the shoot.
Now, of the three of us, I was definitely the "third string", so I was only going to need to be on set for the actual shooting days, which was fine by me cos the other guys are definitely better sliders than I am, and I can only get a bit of extra time off work to do this.
So, about a week or so after the first call I find myself up at the sliding track early in the morning while the film crew with all their equipment and trucks and people and catering services etc are running around the place doing their thing...
Film crew and all their gear filling up the car park at the top of the track.
The project that we are filming is for promotional material for a Virtual Reality experience being put together by one of the large Asian electronics corporations (they have viewing goggles and 360degree video cameras that they want to sell to the consuming masses). The theme of the project is the VR experience of Skeleton sliding, which seems like a good idea to me since it really is an adrenalin rush to do it but its way too inaccessible for most people due to the need for training and access to the very few tracks in the world... And its all intended to coincide roughly with the upcoming Winter Olympics in Jan 2018 which will of course be the peak of the general publics interest in such odd activities as Bobsleigh and Skeleton... So that gives them about a year to take the raw footage from the shoot and do all the CGI and post production work that is needed.
In slightly greater detail, the intent is that the "experience" will start out with a regular entry to a skeleton run (run along the ice with the sled, then lunge forward at a sprint to land on the sled and start taking the steeply banking corners of the track as the speed builds... and then they want to get a little "creative", so there are going to be lots of coloured lights and the rider will kind of leave the reality of the sliding track and head off into a virtual reality ride through a psychedelic universe??? or something like that, and after a minute or so of that, they will come back onto the real world track and the coloured lights will fade away and the run will end at the bottom of the track.
The story board
Right so that's the intent, and the riggers are running around stringing up all sorts of coloured lights in the track and really, all there is for me to do is mostly sit around and wait till they need me to do a run. Oh, and when we do a "run" we have to wear the camera rig... Which isn't as bad as it could be. The rig is an aluminium back plate with about a 20cm high post in the middle of it and on top of the post is a collection of 4 or 5 small camera cubes (very much like GoPro cameras but with better lenses) arranged to get a full 360 degree view of the run and record it in high def'...
The camera rig
Tech's messing with the rig.
Mark and Matt each wearing a rig.
We sliders had some concerns about that post sticking up because it could really cause injuries if we accidently rolled over during the run, but after a couple of tentative early test runs, we figured itd be OK because the tech people on the film crew found that we went too fast for them to get good definition in the video... so they wanted us to go as slow as possible... So if we were going to be going really slow (and slow is about 110kmh-120kmh) then there was virtually no way we could crash :)
So, in order to go slow, the track crew (who look after the ice on the track) just let the frost build up on the track for a couple of days (which really slows us down when we slide).
The only other tricky part of the whole thing was that the camera rig weighed a couple of kilograms, has a significant wind resistance, and it isn't centred on the sled... With it sitting between our shoulders, its about 40cm forward of the balance point, and when we are going 100Kmh, that smallish object (10cmx10cmx10cm) actually has a lot of wind resistance...just try sticking your hand out of a car window at 100kmh and you can feel how much force it generates. The trick with that is that the weight wants to tip the sled forward (unstable), but the drag which only comes into play as the speed builds up, wants to tip the sled backwards. So for the first section of the track we are unstable and tipped forward but for the second half we are overstable and tipped back... It would make for a terrible run on fast ice but since we were on very slow ice we could manage it without too much bother.
So, for a couple of days I hung around at the track and watched filmy people do their "shooting" thing and occasionally Id get to do a run on the track with very slow ice and all sorts of fancy coloured strobing flouro' and LED lighting... (I have to say the lighting was really quite good and I wish we could keep the track lit up like that all the time :)) ) But it was actually quite boring most of the time. As I said though, I was the third string slider and I think I got only about 6 runs in two days ... about half as much as the other two guys.
Matt and Mark waiting around for the director to give us the call to slide.
Mark waiting at the start block
Matt setting up for a run
Matt being released very slowly on one of the first runs
But I felt it was well worth the experience, and a few weeks later I got a cheque in the mail for several thousand dollars for my efforts! I was super pleased with that since it has effectively paid for all my equipment and sliding runs for the last three years and fuel costs for the last couple of years :))
The only picture of Me at the start... I had the camera and so I took most of the pictures :)
So now, if anybody needs me for something filming related, I can just ask them to contact "my agent" I guess :)
...my stardom awaits!
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