#43

43. What did you do for a career? Explain how you chose that career.

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Right now, I'm a salesman/website developer for a gun store. I don't know if either of those job descriptions will be a life long career, but I've been there for a few years now, so it's the closest I have at the moment. I'd really like to be the captain of an interstellar spaceship, or a pulp-style private detective, but I was born in the wrong time for either of those things. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a priest, and for some reason, I have a feeling I'll end up spending my 30+ years as a teacher, all though I don't actually plan to. It's just a very strong feeling I have.

Anyway, I guess I should get to the question here.

I didn't really choose this particular line of work per se, it kind of choose me. I think it was either 2010 or 2011 that I moved back to Dawson Creek. I'd been living in Prince George with a girlfriend, and had spent my time there working at the casino. I was in surveillance, which was kind of neat - if you were curious, all that technology you see casinos having in the movies is real, even in a shitty little one like the Treasure Cove, but most of it doesn't work right. Still, it was kind of fun, and pretty straightforward work. However, even if the work was enjoyable, the politics and co-workers were not. I ended up getting fired with the rest of my shift because the supervisor was somehow a threat to the department manager. I don't know, politics.

After that, I spent many months looking around for work in Prince George, which was tough - the economy there is completely dependent on lumber mills, one of which had recently exploded, and the rest of which were shut down. There was nothing there.

Lisa got to keep her job as a maid at the casino's hotel, so she got us by. We ended up moving out of our cheap, sketchy downtown apartment to a cheap, decrepit log cabin outside of town. It had collapsing floors, no insulation, and no heat besides a little electric job at each end of the building that cost a pile of money to keep running, and didn't do much to keep the place warm.

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I don't have many pictures of this place apparently, but there's a quick shot of the outside corner, and the entryway. Note that it had no ceiling, but I had lots of scarves, so we made it work.

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This had the downside of making the job hunt that much harder - Lisa would take my truck to town in the mornings, and it's not like I could really walk around and hand out resumes. I did some odd jobs for the landlord on the rare occasion - he ran a garage and specialized in fixing up crap and reselling it. Not work I knew much about, but it did mean I got to drive some very cool, if slightly defective rides that I'll likely never even sit in again - Jaguars, Lambos, and so on. Kinda cool.

Anyway, I got pretty depressed with all this (cool not being a substitute for actual work), so I pretty much gave up. I decided that there was one distinct advantage to living in the middle of nowhere, so I used a little bit of money I'd had tucked away to go down to the hydroponics shop and get some lights, timers, pots, and so on. I got some seeds online, and presto, I was ready to grow some pot.

Now, I don't mean to sound immodest, but I think I was pretty damn good at growing pot. Admittedly, my first crop went poorly because we returned to DC for christmas (driving through the worst snowstorm I'd ever seen on the way back, though that's a different story) and the person I left in charge of things apparently never stopped in, but my second crop produced pounds of fist sized buds on par with anything you'll ever see in a magazine. It got you messed up, too.

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I also spent alot of time hanging out with my cat. I miss that cat.

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The real problem I ran into was this: Have you ever seen Breaking Bad? You notice how the big problem through the whole series isn't actually producing top grade meth, but rather finding some way to sell it? Kinda the same issue here. I didn't actually have any way to get rid of it besides $20 at a time, which was pretty pointless. So, after we eventually gave up on trying PG, our "new" van (yet another different story) was basically stuffed to the brim with what was left of the second harvest. The third harvest was literally hung from the ceiling as I had to pull it early in order to move back, and wanted to try and salvage what I could by curing it properly. Yeah, it sounds stupid, but it's not like anyone would have missed the big jars of stank-ass bud piled in the back if we were pulled over, so I wasn't any more worried about leaving the drying sticks in plain sight.

Anyway, once we got back to Dawson, I figured I could make some money selling all this shit. Unfortunately, I ran into the other problem most aspiring drug dealers run into - all your friends think it's free.

What this all added up to was that I was pretty popular and always had a party to attend, was very demoralized about finding a real job, couldn't make anything real at my "other job", and was pretty much hooked to my top notch weed and didn't do much else.

I wasted at least a couple weeks doing this, but eventually it was obviously untenable as a way of spending the rest of my life. Fortunately, a coworker of my dad's, John Morrison had been buying the occasional bag off me, and he informed me that the local gunstore was hiring, and that he'd put in a word for me if I applied.

Now, I didn't actually have all that much interest in guns, nor in sales, but I did suffer from a pretty decent amount of social anxiety. I've never been great with talking to new people, so I figured that being paid and forced to would be a decent way to get over this, as well as being as painless as possible - everyone would be there to talk about one thing, which makes it easy to have something to talk about.

So, I interviewed, somehow I got the job, and there we go. I quickly found that it did help me get passed my social awkwardness, but was unfortunately not a very good place to work otherwise. Bad coworkers make for a bad workplace, and the gunstore is no exception. That said, the pay is better than I can get elsewhere, and right now, no one is hiring, let alone hiring someone with no driver's license or education. So, there I stay.

I mostly got into the website stuff because I was the only person who could change the background on a computer, which meant I must know everything about computers, right? In the end, I think I'm doing a much more efficient and generally better job than anyone else who has done this, so it does give me some sense of accomplishment in an otherwise morale-free workplace, and it's nice to know that even if I'm kind of stuck at my job, I can at least change it up a little bit.

I think that about covers it, in the usual rambly fashion, but with a bit more of a point this time. Cheers!