Consolation Champs – Page 8 – Top of the B-List

Packing for a Funeral

The last few months have been pretty crazy, and the fall always seems to get even busier. Brooke and I just finished our annual film feast at the Toronto International Film Festival and have been looking forward to a vacation for a long time now. We’ve both been so busy that we had hardly done our usual amount of pre-trip planning. But we had booked hotels for six of the ten nights we’d be in Belgium and Luxembourg, and we’d arranged a rental car as well. Things were complicated by the fact that my Dad was taking his annual trip to see his family, first in Ireland and then in Spain. He’s recently become the owner of a new cat (not quite a kitten but still under a year old) and so we made a deal that I’d watch Marmalade for the first week and then drop him off at a local vet for boarding. That made the end of TIFF a little crazier than usual and we’ve been scrambling this week to get things finished at work and prepare for what we hoped would be a relaxing trip abroad.

And then I got an odd Facebook message from my aunt in Spain. She said my uncle and aunt in Dublin had reported that my Dad wasn’t doing too well. Over the past few months, his health has been deteriorating. He’s been a lifelong heavy smoker and about a year ago, I began to hear a lot of wheezing in his breathing. Always reluctant to go to the doctor, he finally had to earlier this year because the over the counter asthma “puffers” he was using weren’t working anymore. As we suspected, he has emphysema and received stronger medicine to help him breathe. But he hadn’t given up smoking.

I’d noticed his activity levels really dropping off recently as well. He used to go out for beers a couple of times a week, but was talking about giving that up, at least during the oppressively hot weather we had been having this summer. But the last time I saw him, about a week ago, he told me he’d fallen after getting up too quickly, and was feeling banged up. He had no energy and was a bit worried about having to travel overseas in a few days. When I got my aunt’s message, I thought that the stress of travelling had been more serious than any of us expected, but that he’d recover after a few rest days.

This morning, however, I had another message from her, that he’d been admitted to hospital with breathing problems, and that I should call my uncle in Dublin right away. The rest of the day has been a bit of a blur. I left work early to go to his apartment so that I could take Marmalade to the vet. While there, I missed a message from a doctor in the ICU unit. Things are more serious than they seemed. He’s on a ventilator and has been intubated to help him breathe. My uncle says he wasn’t even conscious. My cousin who’s a nurse says that once someone is put on a ventilator, there is little chance of coming back to any measure of health. The doctor asked me about what decisions we’d discussed in case he went critical.

So, our planned trip to Brussels on Friday now has a detour to Dublin, and I’m packing a suit, just in case. This is surreal, but I’m also comforted by the fact that he is surrounded by his family, who are taking the very best care of him. In many ways, I feel he might have unconsciously been just waiting for a situation where someone else would take care of him. If this is the end, I feel okay with that. But right now I’m anxious. And I feel disappointed that Brooke, who more than anyone needs a vacation, will have to come along on a not very happy journey with me.

I don’t know what the next few days will hold. I’m not sure we’ll see much of Belgium. But I feel like I wanted to write something down about the way things like this happen. It feels very odd throwing my nice shoes into a suitcase and hoping I don’t need to wear them. And I feel a bit angry about having to alter my plans and spend more money just to be with him, and then I feel guilty for being angry. I know that however this turns out, we’re going to need a vacation more than ever.

The Rule of Twos and Sevens

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the past. Actually, I’m always thinking about the past; I’m inherently nostalgic. But I was thinking specifically about 1992, since it’s 20 years ago this year that I graduated from York University. In those days, I kept a diary, and so I dug out the battered-looking notebook to see what I was going through at this time exactly 20 years ago. It wasn’t pretty. I’ll share more below, but as I began thinking of my life and trying to recognize any sort of pattern, I realized that most important things seemed to happen in years that ended in 2 or 7. Since I was born in 1965, that meant that my age always ended with one of those numbers too. Here’s just a small sample:

1967

My parents bring two-year-old me to Canada in the spring of 1967. The Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup, again! What does it mean that they haven’t won it since?

1972

Seven-year-old me skips a grade at school. Canada beats the USSR in the Summit Series. Did I mention that I’m not even a hockey fan?

1977

I’m 12. We spend three weeks in Bermuda for my dad’s job and then three weeks in Ireland and the UK, just as punk is breaking. It’s also the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

1982

Just before my 17th birthday, I’m “born again,” beginning a tumultuous and ultimately disillusioning two-decade association with evangelicalism. I also lose two grandparents and a great-grandmother, and my parents’ marriage dissolves.

1987

I graduate from four years of “Bible College” without a clear career plan. A few weeks later, my mother, a lifelong smoker, dies from lung cancer at the age of 43. I’m suddenly living on my own without financial support (my Dad’s support payments unceremoniously stop coming).

1992

Early in the year, I’m financially destitute. Down to my last $30 and behind on my bills, I beg my father for help. He offers no money but says I can move in with him rent-free for a while. I sleep on a bed tucked behind his living-room couch. I finish my B.A. in English and History at York University, intending to go to either graduate school or Teachers’ College. I’m turned down everywhere except Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which offers me financial aid to cover about half of the $12,000 fees. Needing an escape from my miserable living situation and a long-simmering unrequited love that’s threatening to devour me, I move to Michigan in September. Despite the fact that I incurred even more debt and never ended up teaching, this year away was extremely important.

1997

After working for three years as a welfare caseworker (a job I landed after being on welfare myself for almost a year), I’m laid off. I take a course in “multimedia and web design” and decide to move to Waterloo to live with my best friend. Unfortunately, I’ve just ended an eight-month relationship with a woman who also lives in Waterloo. A lifelong pedestrian, my job search is limited by the lack of a car, and my presence drives my ex to angrily reclaim all her letters during a dramatic confrontation. A few days later, my old job recalls me, and I move back to Toronto. Waterloo sojourn = 19 days. That summer, I begin dating Brooke, who will later become my wife.

2002

After five years together, Brooke and I marry in October.

2007

Brooke’s dad passes away in the spring. After attending for the previous six years, I moderate my own panel at SXSW Interactive, on the subject of expressing spirituality and finding community online. I spin off my film writing to another blog, Toronto Screen Shots.

2012

The year is still young, but so far, I’ve established a quarterly screening series for short films called Shorts That Are Not Pants. And I’m planning to finally shape my working life into a sustainable and satisfying career. Moves are afoot. Let’s hope 2012 is one of the good years!

Dumb Mobs, 2003

I’ve been shuffling some old papers around recently and came upon the following. It was written in March 2003 as preliminary research for a panel I wanted to moderate at SXSW 2004. I got interesting responses from Bruce Sterling and Clay Shirky, which I might include if there’s interest.

Dumb Mobs, or Keep Your Epinions to Yourself

It was only a matter of time. As more and more of us got online and started to join communities, we began to share our opinions. We became a marketer’s dream, allowing them to gather our most detailed demographic data every time we made a purchase or joined a Yahoo! group. Companies like Amazon began to let us write “reviews” of our purchases and recommend things to others. With a user base of several million individuals, these databases have begun to act as our critical voice whenever we consider an online (or offline) purchase. But how good is the information we receive this way? Will this sort of “mob ranking” replace the advice of trusted sources, and if not, how will these trusted sources establish themselves online? Will it become more difficult to find good information in the flood of online ratings? What kind of forces are at work here? These are the questions I propose to explore.

I was prompted to ask some of these questions during a panel on book publishing during this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference. The moderator had been talking about how the marketing and promotion of books had moved online, mostly due to the web’s reach and the reduced costs involved. I began to think of the way that the critic’s role had also moved online, though not in the way I’d hoped. Sure, people still brought up the New York Times online and some of them even read book reviews there, but more and more sites were adding their own ratings engine and just letting everybody have at it. Something about this made me uncomfortable and I wanted to find out why.

I have participated in this kind of critical activity myself. At the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), users can rate a film out of 10 and write their own reviews which are then added to the site. A bit of a film geek, I’ve endeavoured to rate every film I see, whether it’s a masterpiece, a flop, or just an entertaining bit of fluff. Upon reflection, I think that might be the only way these sites will work. Just as a professional critic must write reviews that fall across a wide spectrum of opinion, each voter on IMDb or Amazon or Epinions must establish the boundaries of their taste. In the case of product reviews, where taste is not an issue, the critic still must establish their standards. Without informing anyone of what we don’t like, sharing what we do like will be meaningless.

However, my experience with these sites shows a different situation. Some users vote only for things they do like. These people would have an average rating that is quite high. Others only point out things they hate, and so their average ratings are quite low. As individual voices, we might be wise to ignore them, but as part of an anonymous mob, they are invisible. We don’t even know how many of them there are. The larger question is how do we know we can trust the ratings presented by a site that doesn’t limit its membership in any way? Sure, it’s democratic, but when it comes to informed opinions, the mob surely doesn’t rule.

Since the machinery behind these databases is hidden to us, I wanted to ask a few experts how they work. Is one better than another? What kind of research is being carried on into making them more useful? Will it really ever be true for me that I will weigh the opinion of the New York Times’ book critic against the mob of user ratings at Amazon and find them equal?

Let’s take Epinions as an example. When I ask it to list dramatic movies in order of rating, I get a very long list of 5-star choices. But I’m almost certain that the people who gave Schindler’s List the top rating were not the same group that elevated Anne of Green Gables to the same lofty place. I can’t be sure, but I’m trusting my gut on this one. I would hazard a guess that most people who take the time to rate their purchases online are a self-selecting group whose opinions tend toward one end of the spectrum or the other.

The interesting thing is how much more influential these algorithms have become, and how opaque they remain. Google’s search algorithm is the big one, but recent stories about the “black box” that is Yelp are also relevant. I wonder if a discussion of these issues might still be interesting, or has the issue already been settled?

Where Do I Go Now?

Yesterday’s post was a necessary look back, but I want to focus now on what’s next. As I mentioned before, I’ve taken myself away on “career retreats” on two previous occasions. In 2003 and again in 2009, I spent a couple of days in Kingston, Ontario, chosen, frankly, for its blandness and lack of distractions (sorry Kingston!). On both occasions, I returned energized and with job descriptions in hand for jobs that did not (yet) exist. On both occasions, I went on to work at those jobs after reaching out to the relevant communitites (wine and film, respectively). And I still have great relationships and potential or ongoing work with both of these communities. So clearly my strategy has been effective. The issue was that in one case (wine), the industry was too small and my prospects limited, and in the other (independent film distribution), the economy made it impossible for me to work full-time for decent wages.

Given that I would like to continue to work with the people I met in those two jobs, I’ve been exploring the idea of launching my own content consultancy. I’ve certainly worked in many different business sectors and have seen the same issues in all of them. A lack of clear communication and a need for guidance when it comes to online tools, for starters. The shape of this new business will need some experimentation and some advice from trusted friends, but it’s a potentially exciting new direction.

And just to reinforce that my basic skill set has been in place all along, here are what I listed as my “transferable skills” back in 2003. Each was based on a job I had performed at some point in my working life:

I’m a person who can:

write clearly

edit

research

sell

teach

explain difficult concepts simply

find cool stuff

learn quickly

lead people

understand technology

read a lot

train others

communicate well verbally

make connections between things

find mistakes and defects

I took the photo for this post myself. It’s a road sign we saw in rural Iceland on our trip there in 2008. I invite usability experts to weigh in on just how helpful this sign could be to anyone traveling by car.

How Did I Get Here?

As I write this post, I’m sitting in a San Francisco café in the midst of my third “career retreat” in the past eight years. For someone who thinks about the world of work so much, I don’t seem to be very good at figuring it out for myself.

I left my position at St. Michael’s Hospital just over a month ago, six months into a ten-month contract. Without getting into too much detail, I was unable to work effectively within such a large organization, with all of its existing power structures and areas of dysfunction. Plenty of people do, but I’ve just realized (again) that I’m not cut out for working in bigger companies.

I’ve been working for money for more than 30 years now. I took my first job in the summer of 1980, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Since that time, the longest I’ve ever held a job has been four years, and that’s been on two occasions. From 1994-1998, I was a welfare caseworker for the City of Toronto. And from 2003-2007, I was the web guy for Lifford Wine Agency. I enjoyed both jobs, but left for similar reasons. I was worried about stagnating. I’ve come to realize that when it comes to work, I have a fear of commitment.

It hasn’t helped that for the past decade, I’ve been working in web-related positions. The online landscape shifts so often as to make just about anyone insecure. I’ve always been happiest as a generalist, but each job I’ve taken in the past few years has pushed me to specialize more and more. I’ve learned a lot about what I don’t like to do in the process. What’s been harder to nail down is what I do like to do.

And so I’m here, spending a week away from my regular routine, reading, thinking and writing about what I want to do with that part of my life devoted to earning money. I’ve tried to be unsentimental about work. My generation may have been the first raised to expect more from our careers, not just money but fulfillment. I’ve always thought that was a tall order. And yet.

We spend half of our waking hours working. We often see our workmates more than the members of our own families. We should be looking for an environment in which we can use all of our abilities and develop good working relationships. We should be able to balance our work and home responsibilities with as little stress as possible. Let’s face it. I’m still an idealist.

Everywhere I have worked, I have diagnosed areas of dysfunction and lamented relationships that just didn’t work out. I’ve often thought that I would make a good manager, but without the power to actually make organizational changes, I know I’d grow bitter and frustrated.

I’ve often joked that entrepreneurs are people who just can’t work with anyone else, and now I feel like I understand that mentality.

Over the past eight years, on my career retreats, I’ve compiled lists of my skills. I’ve read about flow. I’ve tried to combine my passions with my abilities. I’ve created non-existent positions and then sold companies the idea of hiring me to fill them. So why am I still back in this position, unemployed and looking for my next gig?

I’m 46 years old. I like to think that I know myself pretty well. I like to think that the income matters less than the opportunity. That I’m ready to take on new challenges, again. But I worry that others will see me as a job-hopper, as someone who’s never stayed in one place long enough to achieve mastery or to assume responsibilities. As someone who is afraid of commitment.

I often compare the world of work to the world of relationships. And I worry that I’m that guy waiting for “the one” to sweep me off my feet. And I’m perpetually disappointed. And worse, it’s not possible to take a break from working the way one might decide to take a break from dating. We need to work all the time, and when we’re working it’s hard to find energy to find better work. So many people muddle on in jobs they hate. Except me. I get out.

And as each position I leave is found wanting, I worry that I’m running out of options. Who wants to hire someone so unsure of what he wants out of his work?

So this week is about me remembering my experiences, recalibrating my expectations, rethinking my ambitions and researching my options. God help me.

Thanks to Daniele Sartori for making his photo available under a Creative Commons licence.