The Worth of A Diverse Portfolio

And so I finally find time to sit and write. Bit of a long one as a result. Sorry about that. It has all been building up in my head and so probably will lack a little structure as the stream-of-consciousness unfurls through my dancing fingers on the keyboard.
So, I have time to write today. This is mainly because today, I do not have any jobs on, though really I should be preparing for tomorrow's fairly major task; And also my dear lady is asleep upstairs after a long and productive night shift delivering babies. Hence I am unable to use my power tools, which is causing me no end of frustration as I have some beautiful timber I am just about to cut up to make a box for a friend. I have the fence all lined up on my circular saw and have calibrated it particularly accurately using the in-built laser line, a good metal rule and a magnifying glass (this latter because sadly even with my glasses now, resolving millimetres on a rule is a challenge). And so here am, sitting on my hands because I LOVE using my power tools and at the moment cannot.

And this brings me to a strange thought: These last weeks, my new-found means of (self) employment entails me doing for other people those jobs -pruning hedges, hanging trellis on walls, putting up gates, that kind of thing - which I happily do at home for leisure, only now people are paying me to do it. This has to be a Good Thing. And with the inclusion of the magnifying glass and a pencil sharpener to ensure my marking-out is accurate, I am extremely pleased with my handiwork. And so are others, it would seem.

So, when I think about how I made my living for over three decades, using my intellect and my extremely in-depth knowledge of, initially, electronic engineering, it makes me do a kind of internal double-take when I suddenly realise I am no longer using that for which I had trained for so many years.

Will I miss it? Yes, I think so. But I have a microcontroller and some other electronic bits and bobs here which I am getting together for a project so I will probably keep my knowledge up to date to some extent. But the challenges on a daily basis are not technical in the same way. That said, last week I bought the wrong size gate for a customer and found I had to build a suitable one from scratch using the wood and screws I just happened to have in the van. I was quite proud of it, and gratified this only took me twenty minutes or so (though frankly it wasn't difficult).
The challenges are therefore present, but different.

A sturdy bespoke gate built from scratch by my own fair hands. And a rabbit.

The other challenge I perceive is one of values. That sounds rather nebulous and a little existential perhaps. Actually it is not the former but may well encompass the latter. Allow me to elaborate:
when I was a corporate salary-slave, I had a particular role in a professional world. I traveled to far flung countries, I had meetings discussing the configuration and movement of literally millions of dollars' worth of product. I went out for dinner in expensive restaurants. My customers were in the region of tens of millions of dollars a year. People saw this as to some extent responsible and glamorous. I must be somebody to live that life.

Now, my customers are of the order of tens of pounds a day. I travel about in an old van. full of cement, wood and tools. People ask me what I do and I reply "Anything really. I maintain gardens, I put up fences, I hang doors". People on the whole seem rather less impressed with this response than my previous International Man of Mystery persona could provide. And I thought this would bother me. But it really doesn't. Were I inarticulate and felt intellectually inadequate, perhaps I would feel differently. But here I am writing this, able to divert, should I choose to the proteins comprising gluten, the best type of solar panel and charge controller, which philosopher I prefer for consolations in unhappy moments. Only some of this formed part of my education. The rest can be gleaned from books or online.

And this leads me, in my characteristic serpentine fashion, to the point that has been begging for examination in my funny-shaped head these last few weeks:
Where do we find our social value? Was I a somebody and am now a nobody?

Cars and houses seem a big thing in this particular game. I have a car and a house. Neither are remarkable. People wouldn't point to either and be impressed. Both are very ordinary. And yet, I am privileged to have either of them and feel so. My car gets me to see friends, to the shops, to dances. In that, it serves its purpose as well as something several times its cost. My house has more bedrooms than I need most of the time (three). Occasionally they are full of sleeping visitors, but usually, more likely, crates of beer bottles and boxes of books.  It is comfortable, warm and dry and I love living here.
My job, similarly will hopefully, once I have built a customer base, finance my lifestyle adequately. Or maybe I will founder and have to get a job in a shop. We'll see. For now, it looks promising.

So, what seem to be the usual markers of "success" are present, but perhaps my own "humble" examples of that are not perceived as being particularly high up that scale. Does this therefore make someone less "worthy" of regard? Does it cause them to be less likely to be invited to parties or have their company eschewed as being less desirable than that of more obviously "successful" people?
My experience is, actually, in general no. By having good manners and attempting to be genuinely nice to people, and as interesting as I can aspire to be within the confines of my intellect and personality, I have found people are as happy to talk to me and associate with me as an odd-job-man and gardener than when I was jet-setting around the world. It is not always the case, but when I do encounter those who look down upon my car, or who see me as a "loser" for lacking ambition and hence "success", I find in general, they tend not to be very careful in how they form opinions, accepting values from unreliable sources such as advertising or celebrity TV. Or prone to making incorrect assumptions about the nature of happiness and worth.

And so, I conclude that happiness and one's self of self-worth can be easily maintained without the cost of an expensive car or the soul-eroding responsibility of a "high-powered" job. In fact, it seems easier and cheaper to live a well-thought-out but simple life. And that is exactly what I am doing.

My Gap year comes to an end

Three hundred and sixty five days have elapsed since I became unemployed. After thirty two years of gainful and eventually lucrative employment, I was let go via a phone call I mistakenly answered on the beach during my holiday. That was over a year ago now and I still recall the mixture of outrage, relief and fear the call brought with it; Outrage because how dare a manager call me from the other side of the world and launch straight into contract-speak about the end of my career whilst I was on holiday; relief because the final year had been a nerve-wracking roller coaster of managing perceptions of my performance in an impossible job; Fear because I have a huge mortgage and no means to pay it beyond my redundancy payout which is beginning to run out.

The world of employment has become a largely inhumane place. I was lucky that I had relatively good pay and conditions. Others have to scratch a living on zero-hours contracts. But even so, that was no way to divest yourself of an employee. It was cowardly and inconsiderate because no consideration is required, at least beyond that of being a decent human being. Even that was lacking here as it seems no longer to be required in a manager. disappointing.

Possibly by writing this in a publicly visible setting, I burn my bridges. Well, I can't say many bridges have appeared to employment so maybe I lose nothing by this. But somehow I find this helpful to write.

In the last year I have completed probably three hundred job applications. Of those, I heard back in the negative for about six, had three interviews and been ultimately unsuccessful in getting a job. I suspect my age might be a factor. In the interviews it was clear I had significantly more experience at a higher level than the hiring manager and nobody wants an employee like that, do they? After some interviews, I received no further response at all. How indifferent and arrogant is that? Well, another sucker will always come along, won't they!

And so here I am, an electronic engineer, chock-full of all kinds of knowledge, speaking passable French and German, 25 years experience in sales with a major tech company, articulate and healthy. And unemployed. One of a number of cast-aside people with skills to offer that nobody seems to want. And yet industry screams "We need engineers! technologists! Scientifically literate candidates!" as if there were none available. And there are. They are just "too old". Perhaps deemed too expensive to too close to retirement to be considered.

Reading the industry press, my situation is far from unique. Indeed, it seems an endemic problem; Skilled and experienced people in their forties and fifties finding themselves surplus to requirements. It seems a shame that this pool of talent is going to waste. But wasted it is.

And so, I resign myself to never getting another "proper" job again, at least not in the sector I trained for. What to do? Oh, I have a plan. I am not sure if it will come off, but what choice do I have? Too old for tech, too young to retire.

It has been a good year. I went round most of Europe in a van (I never told you about that, did I? 4500 miles in a little over a month, meeting lovely people, some of them from here! Perhaps I should write some of that down) toured Scotland and lived on a beach at the foot of a mountain by the sea for days on end. I spent weeks this summer in Cornwall bobbing about in a canoe. I landscaped the garden. I made hundreds of loaves of bread and ran a baking course. We built a new pizza oven and filled the greenhouse with incredibly productive plants.
I am really good at being unemployed. I am always busy! But now it's a year and I need to do some work. So, I sit down to my business plan, review what I have to offer and find myself... hopeful. Let's see where my new path leads.

Just an atavism really

I almost never come here now. There was a time, oh, a very long time, when this was my lifeline to my eroding self. Now, the forces of distortion are long gone and with it, the need for some kind of assertion of my own will and character.
You hear people say:"I know people think I am a bitch/bastard, but on the inside, I am actually quite nice!"
This is to miss a central truth about identity: We are what we appear to be to others. As far as the world is concerned, what lies within is of no consequence if the external manifestation of a personality is a bitch or bastard. That is what we all experience.
And so, were we to be on a desert island, alone, could we be said to be an extrovert? A kindly soul? Mean-spirited? It doesn't seem so. Perhaps we could be determined or a defeatist. We could struggle valiantly against the odds, or lie down and die. Is that character, personality?
Perhaps our character is then to some extent our own experience of ourselves, at least in properties which are not social attributes.

So, maybe that is what this was: A reassurance that regardless of how external forces try to shape one, personal opinions can remain beyond the reach of others. Knuckling down day-to-day need not mean losing sight of what makes us who we are. We can "secretly" be who we actually are, only ironically of course in a public realm.

Well, I have no need of that now. There are no forces of correction to divert me to a path not of my choosing or contort me to fit the expectations of another. I have no employer (which is not without its own worries) to watch my every keystroke for dissent.

Perhaps then, i have no need of this, being able to "be myself" in the entirety of my "new" life.
But... Oh... this is so difficult! So out of practise have I become that my prose won't flow. It sticks and falters and the results are not as i would have wished. Short of the odd, admittedly verbose, paragraphs in my facbook statuses, I never write now. And that seems a shame.

So, that tells me I need to resume writing. If not here, then elsewhere. Probably not here actually: Too much painful history, though I do enjoy reading back the more whimsical entries. But somewhere. And since this isn't a desert island, personality may be retained.
Ahh, nobody reads this anyway so the pressure is not on. But they might, and so standards must be maintained. And that's the value - rigour.

Where to then? I am not sure. Somewhere because writing this was a real exertion and it shouldn't be. Somewhere else then. Yes. A new start. That feels good. Another one.