Bikeforums.net is a forum about nothing but bikes. Our community can help you find information about hard-to-find and localized information like bicycle tours, specialties like where in your area to have your recumbent bike serviced, or what are the best bicycle tires and seats for the activities you use your bike for.tokolosh
11-15-05, 11:33 PM
just consider this one of those tortured-processing 'agggggghhhh' posts that don't necessarily require replies. i'm driving myself nuts, so i might as well share the misery around a little.
i've been working this contract since mid-july. it's up in mid-january. i knew it was a mistake to take it when i took it, but i've enjoyed such an irrational proportion of my working life that i got a perverse kind of curiousity to see what six months of an overpaid bad mistake would feel like. like a very very VERY bad mistake, is what. i never ever expected or planned to bike to it when i took it, btw. that was one of the reasons why i knew it wasn't my kind of thing. but six weeks in i'd exhausted every one of my inner resources and i was wondering how i'd stay sane for twenty more, so i took up bike commuting out there just to give myself something interesting to fill the time. it's worked, i guess. i'm a lot perkier now than i was four months ago, and this is good. a little obsessed maybe, but at least my jackets all still buckle up the front instead of round the back, between the shoulderblades.
okay. so along come the people i'm working for, and tell me (more than two months before contract-end day) that they're all set up and ready to go with an extension for a further six months. that's not even an option - i mean, obviously if i couldn't feed my kid i'd do it, but even then it wouldn't be an option in the sense that i understand it. now comes the weird part.
i went to talk to the recruiter who handles all this. we discussed some of the alternative possibilities come february - it's actually way too early to say anything meaningful about what they might be, but still. forethunk is forearmed, and all that. the weird part is that he described some of the projects he's got a hand on right now, and every one of them made me drool, EXCEPT that the whole thing looks so much more workable. and i'm darned if i don't find myself thinking of that as a Bad Thing somehow. one of them gave me the flat Dismays; it's only about 3 miles from here. the (potential) others are further, but i'd go right through my own back yard getting to and from. i mean, what? we met in that general area, and all the way home i was scoping the routes for bikeability and planning where and how i'd ride them.
you'd think i'd be thrilled. those routes would work with my life - they go right through the neighbourhoods where i live and do all my hunting and gathering, whereas now i have to do the ride to work and home every day, and THEN make some kind of additional plan and schedule to get myself into those zones to do the life stuff. but i found myself squinting suspiciously at all of it and thinking ' . . . this looks too easy.' it almost seems like it feels like i'd be losing something. no bridge? no industrial wasteland? no sense of being behind the iron curtain for 9 hours a day? sheesh.
i've been working this contract since mid-july. it's up in mid-january. i knew it was a mistake to take it when i took it, but i've enjoyed such an irrational proportion of my working life that i got a perverse kind of curiousity to see what six months of an overpaid bad mistake would feel like. like a very very VERY bad mistake, is what. i never ever expected or planned to bike to it when i took it, btw. that was one of the reasons why i knew it wasn't my kind of thing. but six weeks in i'd exhausted every one of my inner resources and i was wondering how i'd stay sane for twenty more, so i took up bike commuting out there just to give myself something interesting to fill the time. it's worked, i guess. i'm a lot perkier now than i was four months ago, and this is good. a little obsessed maybe, but at least my jackets all still buckle up the front instead of round the back, between the shoulderblades.
okay. so along come the people i'm working for, and tell me (more than two months before contract-end day) that they're all set up and ready to go with an extension for a further six months. that's not even an option - i mean, obviously if i couldn't feed my kid i'd do it, but even then it wouldn't be an option in the sense that i understand it. now comes the weird part.
i went to talk to the recruiter who handles all this. we discussed some of the alternative possibilities come february - it's actually way too early to say anything meaningful about what they might be, but still. forethunk is forearmed, and all that. the weird part is that he described some of the projects he's got a hand on right now, and every one of them made me drool, EXCEPT that the whole thing looks so much more workable. and i'm darned if i don't find myself thinking of that as a Bad Thing somehow. one of them gave me the flat Dismays; it's only about 3 miles from here. the (potential) others are further, but i'd go right through my own back yard getting to and from. i mean, what? we met in that general area, and all the way home i was scoping the routes for bikeability and planning where and how i'd ride them.
you'd think i'd be thrilled. those routes would work with my life - they go right through the neighbourhoods where i live and do all my hunting and gathering, whereas now i have to do the ride to work and home every day, and THEN make some kind of additional plan and schedule to get myself into those zones to do the life stuff. but i found myself squinting suspiciously at all of it and thinking ' . . . this looks too easy.' it almost seems like it feels like i'd be losing something. no bridge? no industrial wasteland? no sense of being behind the iron curtain for 9 hours a day? sheesh.