Work and writing

So I’m at a new job. It’s this place called Automotive Computing Services.

Peals of bells go off every five minutes. For some reason there’s only one phone line into the office, and whenever Natasha, our receptionist, doesn’t pick up the phone, the call gets diverted to the one and only office-wide phone line, hooked up to every last phone here. Oh god it’s gone off again. Each and every phone has its own unique ringtone. So when someone calls, bam, a cacophony of sound galaxies. Rrgh.

From what I can tell, there’s this office culture here of, whenever the sound galaxy kicks off, everyone sighs and shrugs and grits their teeth, going “rrr, someone else pick that shit up! I’m busy, I couldn’t possibly”, so the phones ring and ring and ring until someone finally cracks and answers. And muggins here gets his concentration disrupted, away from writing things like this. Quite annoying. There’s a phone on my desk too, on the other side of my monitor trio so it’s hard to reach over and pick the thing up at a moment’s notice, but I wouldn’t mind prank-calling the incoming callers if I didn’t think I’d be fired immediately.

But it’s quite the sordid tale, me working at ACS in the first place. Of course I dragged my heels with PathWrangler far too long, allowing my savings and buffer to be whittled away, month after month, while PW tanked like the world’s slowest blimp. Hell of a shame - Doug’s a good guy, in the same boat as me, and of course much about startups is hella risky, funding and so forth. But when my funds/savings reservoir has dipped far below zero, when I’m going into credit card debt to pay basic bills and stay afloat? Ugh. I waited far too long. Should have applied for other jobs and had the Hard Talk with Doug months before. Right when he was dragging his heels on my salary.

But what’s done is done. Look forward. ACS is, hm, um, interesting. 85k is not bad at all as salaries go. $150/wk into student loan payments - nice to get progress on that again. $130/wk into Kiwisaver - why yes I would like to get a house in the medium-term future. A great big nice one with a swimming pool. ~$960/wk after-tax income. $260/wk on rent; ~$100/wk on food, $50 on bills? $550/wk disposable income ain’t too shabby. It could be more, but how can I complain about that? 85k is far, far more than most *families* in this country get. I’m doing okay.

ACS isn’t such a bad place, although the adaptation from home work to office work took some doing. Punctuality! Discipline! Ye gods. How rude. Part of me finds this unsettling and jarring and discombobulating - another part of me feels nothing but contempt at this first part and sneers and wishes part 1 to grow a backbone.

The work is pretty laid-back, nothing I haven’t had to deal with before. Fairly standard Rails stuff - running into the usual discombobulation mish-mash of infinity gems and infinity version numbers, but give ‘em a kick and they start working well together. Bootstrap’s a functional if mundane style framework - pedestrian form input styles, although things like its Grid system is fairly snazzy. Doing something as non-Railsy as CSV file uploads - remembering that the average user is already uploading partially-validated data from their own databases instead of injecting the raw data, blind, means many of the standard Rails assumptions about how to manage and validate data no longer apply so strongly. A few misunderstandings with Steve about that, but I think they’re mostly fixed now.

I’m also rather luck in that this new ACS work environment is almost as conducive for novel-writing as working at home was - or possibly even more, as the sharp tang of office-sound around me (telephonic bell-pealing notwithstanding) has a rather pleasing way of focusing the mind.

Upgraded coffee! We has it! Up till now I’d viewed Upgraded coffee as an expensive luxury, and sure, when I’m paying, indeedy it is. But - a quick chat with Natasha, and it turns out the stuff is actually cheaper than the local brands! Persuading her to buy it instead of anything else at all turned out to be unconscionably easy, and now I can enjoy the stuff, any time of day. I brought my own coffee grinder from home - local shops sell it pre-ground.

But writing is great. Hell, I’m writing this at my office desk right now, keenly aware that m’colleagues and m’boss might take a rather dim view of anything non-work-Railsy being processed at my desk.

It’s an interesting topic, this issue of how much leeway I can accumulate for myself, writing-wise, at this place of work. I would love to bang out a novel a year, or even, once I really start feeling like I can hold every last aspect of the novel-writing process in its entirety, in my head, all at once, hell, why not once every few months? Let different ideas swirl round in my head, all the time, get a quiet moment to myself every so often, splurge them out into a Google Docs file much like this one, and once every several months, output yet another novel, of scintillating quality and brilliance, thus allowing me to hobnob at diplomatic occasions and say “Why yes I am a well-renowned Writer, hur hur hur, listen to me for my opinions carry much weight”. Well. Maybe not that, hilarious though that posturing may be. Returning to the original point, it would be very nice to remain at a job like this, where I can bang out enough work to keep Steve happy and satisfied and content, while also banging out enough writing output to keep my creative side happy and content also. For while programming is quite fun, it doesn’t fire me up like writing does. There’s so much more you can do with it! Traverse universes, concoct wild plots, make people laugh with my bullshit.

Actually, come to think of it, a place/job like this is probably the best combination of pay and freedom. Higher payment would be fantastic, but it’d also start reaching into Senior Dev / Team Leader territory and thus involve management of others, more scrutiny and less opportunity to write. Best of both worlds, this.