Job Market or Bust

When I was in high school my guidance counselor would ask me every year what I wanted to do with my life. My answer was always the same, I wanted to be a drifter. Drifter's have the best stories, and if I were any good at the details in my story telling, I'd have amazing stories. I've definitely stayed true to my career choice of drifter.

There was never the desire to work at one place for 20+ years, although I do see some benefits of doing so, pension plans (if they're offered), blindingly hopeful job security, and whatever else you get for working at the same job for so long. It never appealed to me though, I'm antsy and want to experience as much as I can. If I only live once, why would I want to do one thing that I'd more than likely start to resent? I fully believe in our society's mind set that having a "career" is the same as finding your one true love and that's been proven to be total bullshit. Sorry hopeless romantics, I'm still a bit jaded and cynical on that subject.

My Amazon.com adventure has come to an end. I prefer not to speak ill of them, overall, they are a metrics based company when it comes to monitoring work quality. I was transferred to a department within a few months of being employed there. The work was great, it was developing a relatively new department and sanding rough edges to make it smoother for both our customers and our team. While Amazon tends to be focused on the customer, this department was focused more on the company reputation. Pretty sure there aren't a lot of opportunities there that let you tell the customer, "No." I thoroughly enjoyed what I was doing, I woke up happy to be a part of something I worked hard on and saw it come to fruition.

The downfall of it, that dept had no metrics. Your first and second year reviews are based on metrics and for  almost a full year, it looked as though I wasn't doing anything but holding down a chair and getting paid for it. Come review time I had nothing to show for busting my ass and was put on probation. I had 2 months to try and retrain myself how to work in a different dept (while still being involved with the non-metrics based one) and get to a particular level of metrics, I wasn't able to do so, therefore they broke ties.

Shit happens, I had my pity party last night and now I'm doing what I can to move forward. That's what my journey is all about. I can give myself a short period of time to emotionally react to a crappy event and then it's time to pull up my britches and get over it. Pity isn't going to solve my problems, but being proactive in what happens in my life will get me there.

Stay tuned, I'm about to drift on to the next adventure.