sad day... doc throws in the towel
I have been utterly deceiving myself for at least a year. Which is odd, since I usually feel I know myself well.
I've discovered I have come to hate my job.
You read that right: I have come to utterly and completely hate my job. I avoid it, I make excuses, I find other things to do, I drag my feet when I'm doing it. I've been lying to myself and everyone else when I say this is still fun.
No, it's not because of angry customers or bad PR- that's a symptom, not the cause.
I'm tired of it because it's not interesting anymore, there's no innovation, there's no invention, nothing is a challenege.
I have no more motivation, I have no more urge, I have no more drive.
For those of you that will inevitably suggest a "break", been there, done that. Tried it and it didn't help. I've taken days, I've taken weeks, I've taken a month or two at times. I completely burned myself out this past December, and barely rose above an occasional puttering in the shop for January.
Didn't help.
I used to love this. There was a time I'd have done the work for free just because it was interesting and cool and fun. In fact, I did do a lot of work for free, and a bunch more greatly undervalued. I've given away anodizing work, I've charged less for plating than its cost me, I've had runs of items made for a bunch of money, and then given half of them away.
And chances are, I'd get a nice slap in the face in return.
I used to do work I was proud of. I wanted to show it off. Look what I did, World!
Now? I could care less. Finish it, pack it, get it gone. Go away. Which is pretty much what I get- I like a good ego stroke just like the next guy. I do a $250 mod for somebody, and I never hear a word back. Did he like it? Was he happy? Did he even get the damn thing? Nothing. Not a word.
Meanwhile some kid I owe a $30 part to is broadcasting how much of a lying ******* I am on ten bulletin boards when his piece is a week late.
I finish it up and send it, sometimes with a refund, sometimes with free extras. Does the kid go back to any of the posts and at least note that he did, in fact, actually receive it?
'Course not.
Yes, I know I deserve it, I have taken far too long on some projects or deliveries. Call it frustrated artist syndrome, hell I don't know. Call it ferret-with-ADD; "Oh look, something new over here that's shiny!" Guilty on both counts.
But the complaints are just a small part of it. Most of 'em have a legit beef, I have no excuses other than lack of time or maybe the lack of a wife standing over my shoulder and nagging me.
Mainly, it's not fun anymore. It's production. It's Work. It's tedium.
Yeah, I know most of you work at a "real" job that's hardly exciting and is basically just boring as hell. I've been there, I did that, I had the 401(k) to prove it.
I started doing this in 1998 after two years of trying to make a paintball field work. It was fun while it lasted, but we didn't have the client base, and as a first small business, there was way more "I know what I'm doing" than actually knowing what I was doing.
I left that for full-time gunwork. I had the minimal tools, I had the knowhow, I had a bit of skill- no, screw that self-depreciating crap, I was damned good even back then- and I had a lot of drive and enthusiasm.
I started this very board to gather together more like-minded people, and I'm still proud to see how many talented guys gather under its banner, and how they, too, have carved a niche and made some impressive works.
Those works helped me, too. I'd see something, be inspired, and I'd run out and try one myself. Or be reinspired on an old project, or at least driven to get back out to the shop and make chips again.
But that all has long since worn thin. Those works are no less impressive- and in fact keep getting better and more inventive- but they don't inspire me anymore. I'm not interested. Two years ago, I'd have been all over the Ion for a few days, learning how it worked and hoping somebody would post pics of the internals... Now, I couldn't care less. Whee, another gun. Big whoop.
Same with bulletin boards. I used to crawl all over WARPIG, PBNation, AO and half a dozen other boards. I'd read interesting articles, I'd save any photo of a cool mod or internal shot of a marker for later reference, or just read to get an idea how paintballers elsewhere think. I used to check the Guild four or five or ten times a day, even going back to the second page to answer questions.
Now? The only reason I turned this goddam box on today was to see how my Ebay auctions closed. I fired it up for ten minutes yesterday to answer some 'mail, then shut down and tried to go find something interesting to do.
E-Mail is another thing. I used to enjoy chatting with other players, other builders, various friends. But my mail has been nothing but work for so long, it too has lost whatever it once had. I remember being thrilled when I got A message. I might have spent an hour composing a detailed reply.
I remember thinking it was so cool I'd be getting ten, even fifteen messages a day. I couldn't spend as long answering, of course, but it was still interesting, I still enjoyed hearing from other players.
Nowadays, I get dozens upon dozens of messages a day, and nothing is the least bit interesting. Nobody asks about something cool, they're basically just kicking tires. And that's what really annoys me- Somebody might ask about, say, halfblocking a 'Cocker. I'll tell them I have these Fastback bodies available, or I can do such-and-such a conversion, here's what's involved, here's a rough idea of what it'll cost and what you get, here's an option or two.
Do I ever hear back? Maybe once in twenty, probably closer to one in thirty. The rest just buzzed in, wanted a price in case mommy ever gives them the money for the mod, then went off to the next shiny thing.
Yes, I know that's the cost of doing business. I know that even McDonalds has to put an ad in front of a hundred thousand people just to get six or a dozen into their store. That's the way things work.
Doesn't mean it's not wearing, doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ***. Doesn't mean not I'm utterly, completely, wholly sick of it and tired of doing it. Sick of doing every detail, sick of handling each and every nut, bolt, invoice and email, sick of trying to do a hundred things, having time for three and money for one.
It's been my life for the past seven years at least. Any money I made went right back into tools or parts. Damn near every dime I've made in the past seven years, plus some I've borrowed. Any time I had went to working in the shop. Any time on the computer was spent working on websites, or reading bulletin boards, or answering E-mail. All, of course, related to the business.
Yes, I figured the expenditure would be worth it. I never expected to get rich, partly because it was fun and interesting, which was it's own reward. It would have been nice to make a living at it, but it's been the better part of seven years, and right now, I'm down to hoping I can get some of the cash in from my Ebay sales just to cover bills.
Again.
I found a lathe, a machine tool, online and contemplated spending some money I don't have on it. After a moment I stopped and thought to myself "what the HELL do you need that for? To make more parts you don't want to build? To work on more guns you have no interest in?"
Why the hell should I scrimp and save up another $3,500 so I might be able to do a couple hundred in work and still barely be able to afford mac & cheese or cheap Ramen?
When I drive somewhere, it's to pick up or drop off parts for shopwork, or to pick up or drop off at the post office. When I drive to Anchorage or Homer, it's for work. When I'm in front of my PC, it's for work. When I'm in the shop, it's for work. When I get mail, it's for work.
"Don't *****", you say, "my job's boring too!"? Try a job you can't leave. Try a 24-hour a day job. Try a job demanding your attention from the moment you get up, and one you're still thinking about when you go to bed.
I don't go out, I don't watch TV, I don't go to the movies. My snowmachine is sitting out there under a foot of snowfall that fell over six weeks ago. I don't even know where the keys are.
I've had the parts to make my Toronado street-legal for almost a year. All it needs are headlights, front turn signals, and a halfshaft boot repaired. Then I can get it aligned and do some other minor little things, and I can drive it. Basically most of a work-weeks' time and it'd be a daily driver.
But it's still sitting in the shop, untouched since the car show last May, which was the first time it'd been off the property in almost a decade.
I've owned this car since 1984 and I've put less than 3,000 miles on it.
I can't work on it because there's always that nagging guilt in the back of my mind, one that's been there for years. "Why are you working on this? That XXXXX needs to be finished! Customer YYY is already angry his ZZZZZZ isn't done yet!"
What's worse is that somebody WILL on occasion send me something interesting... but before I can work on it, I have all this other stuff that's already overdue, squeezing that same guilt-gland.
So THAT gets set aside until I've "caught up on this other stuff"... and then it too turns into an overdue project and just another layer of guilt.
I'm sick of it. Completely, totally sick of it. It holds almost no interest for me anymore. I've been there, I've done it, and you know what? I don't even have a T-shirt to show for it. At the end of seven years of nearly seven-day-a-week work and thousands of 10 and 12 and even 16-hour days, I have very little to show for it.
I have no savings, I have no investments, what little PB gear I have is basically obsolete, and what's the point of having it anyway, since nobody here in town plays? I have to drive a minimum of two hours to find a group of six or eight players. I have a shopful of nice tools, yes, but seven years work for maybe $10K in tooling, that's worth maybe $6K if I tried to sell it?
My own stuff rots into the ground for lack of time, money and motivation to work on it. Customer stuff hangs around because it's no longer any fun to work on it.
What am I going to do now?
I have no idea. I really don't. I could go get a job at a McDonalds or over at Home Depot or something, and not only would I make considerably more money, I'd have the luxury of being able to completely forget about work or business or anything else when I'm not at work.
I haven't been "not at work" for five years. That's a foreign concept to me. I have nothing, own nothing, do nothing that is not work-related.
I don't want to get a "real" job. I'm ill-suited to "real" jobs, which is part of the reason this biz was so appealing in the first place, and probably a big chunk of why I was good at it.
I don't know what to do. I have to earn a living somehow. I'm not jumping ship just yet, nor making plans to... yet. But if I had something else in mind at the moment... If I could make even a temporary living off my comic strip, for example, I'd jump at it in a heartbeat right now.
That, out of anything I'm doing right now, is about all that's still interesting at the moment. That's my one bit of 'fun' I get these days.
For right now, I'm still focusing on getting the last of the old stuff done and shipped, get all my owes and debts cleared up, there'll be a few more things listed on Ebay and I still have a couple boxes of small Garage Sale stuff that's not worth Ebaying, but after that point? I don't know. I might think of something interesting, I might decide to bag it and go get a 'real' job, I might figure out something else.
I may keep going. Hell, I don't know.
For those of you that read this and think "Boo-hoo, cry me a river" or "Gee, he has his own shop, sets his own hours and works on paintball stuff all day and thinks THAT'S a hard job?!?" please do me a favor and place it somewhere befreft of solar illumination. Call me a pansy or wimp or whatever, but the fact of the matter is my work is a sort of art form, and art needs inspiration.
Any idiot can bolt together a 'Cocker out of storebought parts. In fact, they regularly do. But to make something better requires imagination and creativity, and the skill to produce it. Without imagination, Van Gogh was just a housepainter.
Doc.
here is the link.....
I've discovered I have come to hate my job.
You read that right: I have come to utterly and completely hate my job. I avoid it, I make excuses, I find other things to do, I drag my feet when I'm doing it. I've been lying to myself and everyone else when I say this is still fun.
No, it's not because of angry customers or bad PR- that's a symptom, not the cause.
I'm tired of it because it's not interesting anymore, there's no innovation, there's no invention, nothing is a challenege.
I have no more motivation, I have no more urge, I have no more drive.
For those of you that will inevitably suggest a "break", been there, done that. Tried it and it didn't help. I've taken days, I've taken weeks, I've taken a month or two at times. I completely burned myself out this past December, and barely rose above an occasional puttering in the shop for January.
Didn't help.
I used to love this. There was a time I'd have done the work for free just because it was interesting and cool and fun. In fact, I did do a lot of work for free, and a bunch more greatly undervalued. I've given away anodizing work, I've charged less for plating than its cost me, I've had runs of items made for a bunch of money, and then given half of them away.
And chances are, I'd get a nice slap in the face in return.
I used to do work I was proud of. I wanted to show it off. Look what I did, World!
Now? I could care less. Finish it, pack it, get it gone. Go away. Which is pretty much what I get- I like a good ego stroke just like the next guy. I do a $250 mod for somebody, and I never hear a word back. Did he like it? Was he happy? Did he even get the damn thing? Nothing. Not a word.
Meanwhile some kid I owe a $30 part to is broadcasting how much of a lying ******* I am on ten bulletin boards when his piece is a week late.
I finish it up and send it, sometimes with a refund, sometimes with free extras. Does the kid go back to any of the posts and at least note that he did, in fact, actually receive it?
'Course not.
Yes, I know I deserve it, I have taken far too long on some projects or deliveries. Call it frustrated artist syndrome, hell I don't know. Call it ferret-with-ADD; "Oh look, something new over here that's shiny!" Guilty on both counts.
But the complaints are just a small part of it. Most of 'em have a legit beef, I have no excuses other than lack of time or maybe the lack of a wife standing over my shoulder and nagging me.
Mainly, it's not fun anymore. It's production. It's Work. It's tedium.
Yeah, I know most of you work at a "real" job that's hardly exciting and is basically just boring as hell. I've been there, I did that, I had the 401(k) to prove it.
I started doing this in 1998 after two years of trying to make a paintball field work. It was fun while it lasted, but we didn't have the client base, and as a first small business, there was way more "I know what I'm doing" than actually knowing what I was doing.
I left that for full-time gunwork. I had the minimal tools, I had the knowhow, I had a bit of skill- no, screw that self-depreciating crap, I was damned good even back then- and I had a lot of drive and enthusiasm.
I started this very board to gather together more like-minded people, and I'm still proud to see how many talented guys gather under its banner, and how they, too, have carved a niche and made some impressive works.
Those works helped me, too. I'd see something, be inspired, and I'd run out and try one myself. Or be reinspired on an old project, or at least driven to get back out to the shop and make chips again.
But that all has long since worn thin. Those works are no less impressive- and in fact keep getting better and more inventive- but they don't inspire me anymore. I'm not interested. Two years ago, I'd have been all over the Ion for a few days, learning how it worked and hoping somebody would post pics of the internals... Now, I couldn't care less. Whee, another gun. Big whoop.
Same with bulletin boards. I used to crawl all over WARPIG, PBNation, AO and half a dozen other boards. I'd read interesting articles, I'd save any photo of a cool mod or internal shot of a marker for later reference, or just read to get an idea how paintballers elsewhere think. I used to check the Guild four or five or ten times a day, even going back to the second page to answer questions.
Now? The only reason I turned this goddam box on today was to see how my Ebay auctions closed. I fired it up for ten minutes yesterday to answer some 'mail, then shut down and tried to go find something interesting to do.
E-Mail is another thing. I used to enjoy chatting with other players, other builders, various friends. But my mail has been nothing but work for so long, it too has lost whatever it once had. I remember being thrilled when I got A message. I might have spent an hour composing a detailed reply.
I remember thinking it was so cool I'd be getting ten, even fifteen messages a day. I couldn't spend as long answering, of course, but it was still interesting, I still enjoyed hearing from other players.
Nowadays, I get dozens upon dozens of messages a day, and nothing is the least bit interesting. Nobody asks about something cool, they're basically just kicking tires. And that's what really annoys me- Somebody might ask about, say, halfblocking a 'Cocker. I'll tell them I have these Fastback bodies available, or I can do such-and-such a conversion, here's what's involved, here's a rough idea of what it'll cost and what you get, here's an option or two.
Do I ever hear back? Maybe once in twenty, probably closer to one in thirty. The rest just buzzed in, wanted a price in case mommy ever gives them the money for the mod, then went off to the next shiny thing.
Yes, I know that's the cost of doing business. I know that even McDonalds has to put an ad in front of a hundred thousand people just to get six or a dozen into their store. That's the way things work.
Doesn't mean it's not wearing, doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ***. Doesn't mean not I'm utterly, completely, wholly sick of it and tired of doing it. Sick of doing every detail, sick of handling each and every nut, bolt, invoice and email, sick of trying to do a hundred things, having time for three and money for one.
It's been my life for the past seven years at least. Any money I made went right back into tools or parts. Damn near every dime I've made in the past seven years, plus some I've borrowed. Any time I had went to working in the shop. Any time on the computer was spent working on websites, or reading bulletin boards, or answering E-mail. All, of course, related to the business.
Yes, I figured the expenditure would be worth it. I never expected to get rich, partly because it was fun and interesting, which was it's own reward. It would have been nice to make a living at it, but it's been the better part of seven years, and right now, I'm down to hoping I can get some of the cash in from my Ebay sales just to cover bills.
Again.
I found a lathe, a machine tool, online and contemplated spending some money I don't have on it. After a moment I stopped and thought to myself "what the HELL do you need that for? To make more parts you don't want to build? To work on more guns you have no interest in?"
Why the hell should I scrimp and save up another $3,500 so I might be able to do a couple hundred in work and still barely be able to afford mac & cheese or cheap Ramen?
When I drive somewhere, it's to pick up or drop off parts for shopwork, or to pick up or drop off at the post office. When I drive to Anchorage or Homer, it's for work. When I'm in front of my PC, it's for work. When I'm in the shop, it's for work. When I get mail, it's for work.
"Don't *****", you say, "my job's boring too!"? Try a job you can't leave. Try a 24-hour a day job. Try a job demanding your attention from the moment you get up, and one you're still thinking about when you go to bed.
I don't go out, I don't watch TV, I don't go to the movies. My snowmachine is sitting out there under a foot of snowfall that fell over six weeks ago. I don't even know where the keys are.
I've had the parts to make my Toronado street-legal for almost a year. All it needs are headlights, front turn signals, and a halfshaft boot repaired. Then I can get it aligned and do some other minor little things, and I can drive it. Basically most of a work-weeks' time and it'd be a daily driver.
But it's still sitting in the shop, untouched since the car show last May, which was the first time it'd been off the property in almost a decade.
I've owned this car since 1984 and I've put less than 3,000 miles on it.
I can't work on it because there's always that nagging guilt in the back of my mind, one that's been there for years. "Why are you working on this? That XXXXX needs to be finished! Customer YYY is already angry his ZZZZZZ isn't done yet!"
What's worse is that somebody WILL on occasion send me something interesting... but before I can work on it, I have all this other stuff that's already overdue, squeezing that same guilt-gland.
So THAT gets set aside until I've "caught up on this other stuff"... and then it too turns into an overdue project and just another layer of guilt.
I'm sick of it. Completely, totally sick of it. It holds almost no interest for me anymore. I've been there, I've done it, and you know what? I don't even have a T-shirt to show for it. At the end of seven years of nearly seven-day-a-week work and thousands of 10 and 12 and even 16-hour days, I have very little to show for it.
I have no savings, I have no investments, what little PB gear I have is basically obsolete, and what's the point of having it anyway, since nobody here in town plays? I have to drive a minimum of two hours to find a group of six or eight players. I have a shopful of nice tools, yes, but seven years work for maybe $10K in tooling, that's worth maybe $6K if I tried to sell it?
My own stuff rots into the ground for lack of time, money and motivation to work on it. Customer stuff hangs around because it's no longer any fun to work on it.
What am I going to do now?
I have no idea. I really don't. I could go get a job at a McDonalds or over at Home Depot or something, and not only would I make considerably more money, I'd have the luxury of being able to completely forget about work or business or anything else when I'm not at work.
I haven't been "not at work" for five years. That's a foreign concept to me. I have nothing, own nothing, do nothing that is not work-related.
I don't want to get a "real" job. I'm ill-suited to "real" jobs, which is part of the reason this biz was so appealing in the first place, and probably a big chunk of why I was good at it.
I don't know what to do. I have to earn a living somehow. I'm not jumping ship just yet, nor making plans to... yet. But if I had something else in mind at the moment... If I could make even a temporary living off my comic strip, for example, I'd jump at it in a heartbeat right now.
That, out of anything I'm doing right now, is about all that's still interesting at the moment. That's my one bit of 'fun' I get these days.
For right now, I'm still focusing on getting the last of the old stuff done and shipped, get all my owes and debts cleared up, there'll be a few more things listed on Ebay and I still have a couple boxes of small Garage Sale stuff that's not worth Ebaying, but after that point? I don't know. I might think of something interesting, I might decide to bag it and go get a 'real' job, I might figure out something else.
I may keep going. Hell, I don't know.
For those of you that read this and think "Boo-hoo, cry me a river" or "Gee, he has his own shop, sets his own hours and works on paintball stuff all day and thinks THAT'S a hard job?!?" please do me a favor and place it somewhere befreft of solar illumination. Call me a pansy or wimp or whatever, but the fact of the matter is my work is a sort of art form, and art needs inspiration.
Any idiot can bolt together a 'Cocker out of storebought parts. In fact, they regularly do. But to make something better requires imagination and creativity, and the skill to produce it. Without imagination, Van Gogh was just a housepainter.
Doc.
here is the link.....
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