End of the week, beginning of career?
Another week down, another 40 hours logged.
I still think about how much better I liked it doing delivery work, but the hours are inconsistent, so I settle for the M-F 9-5 in the deli.
I don't know who all I've talked to about this, but I've made a change in my career aspirations.
You might have heard for a while that that I'd been angling to work as a technical writer, ideally at Microsoft, if everything went According To Plan. I was excited about this in the beginning, computers and software being an area that I'm hugely fascinated by, and follow as often as I can. I started learning some Java this summer, and have dabbled in HTML, CSS, and Ruby, but frankly, it hasn't gone anywhere. It was fun to fool around with, but as I fooled around with it more and more I decided that it would never be something that I'd want to do for any great period of time, let alone with the pressure of of it being employment, let alone employment at Microsoft. (sidebar: and besides, who was I fooling? Mac on Macs? at Microsoft?)
So, I'd kind of been in a doldrums, unsure of what I was really gonna do next, as my coding went from halfhearted to nonexistent.
Enter my trip to San Francisco. It was a whirlwind tour, I spent about 36 hours total there, divided between walking around the city, sleeping, and wedding stuff. I liked walking around the city, and air travel without my parents was new. And of course the wedding was fantastic, as only a Kelly/Stephens wedding can be. I talked with a lot of family there, and with my dad.
Now, if you know anything about my extended family, the maritime industry will come up. My dad is a Puget Sound harbor pilot, my uncles own a shipyard, my grandfather worked at Icicle Seafoods, pretty much all of my male relatives older than 25 have spent summers in Alaska fishing at the very least. I got to thinking what it'd be like, the sea life. I talked with my dad about my disenchantment with software as a career path and he told me about the maritime industry's current need for people who are willing to go through the rigorous process of jumping through all sorts of rules and regs type of hoops. I've always held in the back in my mind that to have a job like my dad's would be a dream, though I was never really sure if it was the one for me. But, having talked with my cousins and uncles and my dad about it, I think I'm interested in pursuing it.
To go about this, I'd enter the Pacific Maritime Institute, a new school that has opened on the Seattle waterfront, near the Coast Guard base and the stadiums. Here I'd train for 2 years, divided into classroom learning and actual sea time. I could get my training paid for by a company to sponsor me, such as Foss or Crowley, in exchange for a few years of work afterward. I'd come out a full mate (that's the next guy down from captain, just so you know), spend a few years like that, then hopefully get a captaincy, a few more years, and then start angling to get at the Puget Sound Pilots, sometime around when I'm 30, assuming nothing else comes up.
So, I dunno. It's a lot to think about. I don't want to have to leave the Seattle area long enough that I'd have to take up some sort of semi-permanent residency anywhere else, especially because it's probably better to have more Puget Sound experience if I'm interested in being a pilot here. I'm gonna start looking into it, calling my dad's friends about taking rides on their tugboats, seeing if it really feels like the right thing for me.
I like the idea of it, tying this back into my current slight disaffection with deli work, because it's more my sort of work, a clear division between straightforward, time-delineated tasks and non-working time. Even though it's not an office, I don't think I like the fact that, while I'm in the deli, I always have to find something to do, just to fill up the hours. I like my hours to be filled, and to tackle them, not to wait and see what comes up. On the other side of things, I don't like long, drawn out, incremental projects, which, on further reflection, I sort of realize is the main task of technical writing. Going back to school, I never had any sort of outline/draft/revision process to writing. I gathered my sources, flipped through them for a while, then sat down and wrote the thing, usually only a day or two before the due date. I don't think I'd stand up well among 'real' writers.
In any case, this is a new thing to pursue. Hopefully, it'll play out, and I'll enjoy starting my career on the sea, in the long-standing Kelly tradition. If not, I'm still young, and have plenty of time to see what's out there for me.
I still think about how much better I liked it doing delivery work, but the hours are inconsistent, so I settle for the M-F 9-5 in the deli.
I don't know who all I've talked to about this, but I've made a change in my career aspirations.
You might have heard for a while that that I'd been angling to work as a technical writer, ideally at Microsoft, if everything went According To Plan. I was excited about this in the beginning, computers and software being an area that I'm hugely fascinated by, and follow as often as I can. I started learning some Java this summer, and have dabbled in HTML, CSS, and Ruby, but frankly, it hasn't gone anywhere. It was fun to fool around with, but as I fooled around with it more and more I decided that it would never be something that I'd want to do for any great period of time, let alone with the pressure of of it being employment, let alone employment at Microsoft. (sidebar: and besides, who was I fooling? Mac on Macs? at Microsoft?)
So, I'd kind of been in a doldrums, unsure of what I was really gonna do next, as my coding went from halfhearted to nonexistent.
Enter my trip to San Francisco. It was a whirlwind tour, I spent about 36 hours total there, divided between walking around the city, sleeping, and wedding stuff. I liked walking around the city, and air travel without my parents was new. And of course the wedding was fantastic, as only a Kelly/Stephens wedding can be. I talked with a lot of family there, and with my dad.
Now, if you know anything about my extended family, the maritime industry will come up. My dad is a Puget Sound harbor pilot, my uncles own a shipyard, my grandfather worked at Icicle Seafoods, pretty much all of my male relatives older than 25 have spent summers in Alaska fishing at the very least. I got to thinking what it'd be like, the sea life. I talked with my dad about my disenchantment with software as a career path and he told me about the maritime industry's current need for people who are willing to go through the rigorous process of jumping through all sorts of rules and regs type of hoops. I've always held in the back in my mind that to have a job like my dad's would be a dream, though I was never really sure if it was the one for me. But, having talked with my cousins and uncles and my dad about it, I think I'm interested in pursuing it.
To go about this, I'd enter the Pacific Maritime Institute, a new school that has opened on the Seattle waterfront, near the Coast Guard base and the stadiums. Here I'd train for 2 years, divided into classroom learning and actual sea time. I could get my training paid for by a company to sponsor me, such as Foss or Crowley, in exchange for a few years of work afterward. I'd come out a full mate (that's the next guy down from captain, just so you know), spend a few years like that, then hopefully get a captaincy, a few more years, and then start angling to get at the Puget Sound Pilots, sometime around when I'm 30, assuming nothing else comes up.
So, I dunno. It's a lot to think about. I don't want to have to leave the Seattle area long enough that I'd have to take up some sort of semi-permanent residency anywhere else, especially because it's probably better to have more Puget Sound experience if I'm interested in being a pilot here. I'm gonna start looking into it, calling my dad's friends about taking rides on their tugboats, seeing if it really feels like the right thing for me.
I like the idea of it, tying this back into my current slight disaffection with deli work, because it's more my sort of work, a clear division between straightforward, time-delineated tasks and non-working time. Even though it's not an office, I don't think I like the fact that, while I'm in the deli, I always have to find something to do, just to fill up the hours. I like my hours to be filled, and to tackle them, not to wait and see what comes up. On the other side of things, I don't like long, drawn out, incremental projects, which, on further reflection, I sort of realize is the main task of technical writing. Going back to school, I never had any sort of outline/draft/revision process to writing. I gathered my sources, flipped through them for a while, then sat down and wrote the thing, usually only a day or two before the due date. I don't think I'd stand up well among 'real' writers.
In any case, this is a new thing to pursue. Hopefully, it'll play out, and I'll enjoy starting my career on the sea, in the long-standing Kelly tradition. If not, I'm still young, and have plenty of time to see what's out there for me.