The Right Kind of Unemployed.
Filed Under Unemployed |
In the fall of 2003 I was framing houses full time, looking forward to my wedding that December. I was putting in close to 60 hours per week with my tool bags on, and at the time it felt great. I was coming off a stretch of (the wrong kind of) unemployment so it felt good to work hard and get paid. I’d come home every day very satisfied with myself that I’d put in a long day and made good money. At least I thought it was good money. $12 an hour was more than I’d ever made before working construction. I remember standing in the trusses (structural lumber that your roof is made of) as we worked to finish the roof on a large custom home in Salt Lake when I had this thought: I spend a lot more time with the guys on this framing crew than I do with my soon-to-be wife, my parents, and my brothers and sister. My parents and siblings all lived a good distance away, so it didn’t seem too strange not seeing them much. I just couldn’t get past the idea that I was with a bunch of construction workers a lot more than I was with the girl I was about to marry. I don’t know why it became such a dominating thought; it’s a fact for almost everybody who works full time that they spend more time with their co-workers than they do with their family members and friends. That’s why you see such close bonds formed by people that work together. I just happen to think it’s dumb. I guess that may have been when I realized (probably for the thousandth time) I’m just not cut out for a corporate job.
Today’s problem is this: Four years have passed and I have a corporate job. In my defense I’ll say it’s not a typical corporate job. I wear shorts to work two days a week. I’m good friends with my bosses and they’re laid back — as laid back as you can be when you employ 500 people. It’s a commission sales job so I have a lot of control over my income and I don’t have to play office politics or beg if I want a raise; if I want more money all I have to do is make more sales. I’m grateful to say I make an excellent living, especially for a guy who got within three classes of a bachelor’s degree and then walked away from school. Maybe sprinted. (More on that later.) I work with cool people and we laugh a lot. Can’t complain, right?
Wrong. They own me. I may have a ‘flexible’ schedule and understanding employers, but when all is said and done they’re in charge of where I spend my time and what I do with it. I cringe as I re-read that sentence. It makes me crazy to think that I have to show up to a building at an appointed hour every day, use a time clock (shudder) to declare my presence and then sit at a desk forty or fifty hours per week, making a nice living for myself and making other people rich. I don’t fault the owners of the company. They took the risk of starting and building it; they deserve to get paid. They take good care of me and my co-workers. They established the rules of the game I call my job, and I’m a willing, albeit fidgety participant.
My goal (obsession) is to get Unemployed. The right kind of Unemployed. Forgive me for making up my own definition for the word, but it goes like this: to be Unemployed means first and foremost to be the owner of my time and the one that dictates how it will be invested. Secondly, to be unemployed means to be the owner of the income streams that provide my family with its lifestyle. Everyone should want to be my kind of Unemployed. Most people want it, but won’t admit it. I’m going to use this blog to do two things: 1. track my progress toward happy unemployment, and 2. inspire corporate monkeys everywhere to run screaming from their salaries, their ‘paid vacations’ and most of all, from their cubicles (insert all cliches about caged animals, prison, etc here). The Unemployed life is the good life. Let’s get jobless.
Comments
Leave a Reply
