Big Fish Little Fish

“Ambitious” “Focused” “Aspiring” “Overachiever”

These are all words that would never be used to describe me. I am not an ambitious person. Sure, I have desires and dreams but more in a Walter Mitty sense than ‘success at any cost’. I don’t remember ever being really ambitious. I do remember that as a very young child every ambition I did have centred on being able to buy my mum a ‘big boat and a big big box of chocolates’. Whatever future career I dreamed up for myself, and I changed my aspirations more often than I changed my t-shirt, it would always be for this same sole purpose:

“When I grow up mummy, I’m going to be a Horse Guard so I can buy you a big boat and a big big box of chocolates”.

Now, I can understand about the big big box of chocolates; what woman wouldn’t want a big big box of chocolates? But I have no idea whatsoever where this notion that my mum would want a big boat came from. I don’t remember her ever mentioning wanting a boat of any kind, let alone a big one. Nevertheless, this idea stuck in my head far longer than any of my career choices ever did. Needless to say I never joined the Horse Guards.

There are people who know from a very early age exactly what they want to do with their lives, and their childhood decisions are focused on achieving this goal, even if they’re not aware of it at the time. I have to admit, I kind of envy those people. There was a kid at my primary school. Actually, from what I remember there were several kids; I believe I may even have been one myself. But for the purposes of what I’m about to say I’m focusing on this one kid in particular. His name was, and still is, Philip. Philip was one of those kids who, I’m sure, had already made up his mind what he was going to spend the rest of his life doing. For him there was no alternative, and although I never saw him again after primary school, I’ll bet my last penny that he never once lost his focus. You see, Philip was obsessed with TV and radio; it’s what he was known for. Well that, and “driving” around the classroom using his text book as a steering wheel.

There was a weekly magazine out at the time called “Look-in” which was a children’s version of the TVTimes. Among other things, Look-in would have listings of all the children’s TV programs that were on the ITV channel that week (these were the days when we only had 3 channels). Every week Philip would study Look-in from cover to cover and would know every program that was on, the time it started, and a short synapses of the main plot points. In short, Philip was a walking, talking TV listings magazine, and we used him as such. If at any point during the school day you wanted to know what was going to be on TV any time over the coming two weeks, Philip was your boy. I don’t think there’s a single person who knew him that didn’t think he would somehow end up in the entertainment industry.

After primary school, the next time I heard of Philip was whilst listening to Chris Tarrant on Capital fm’s breakfast show, being introduced two or three times an hour as the helicopter bound traffic reporter. Philip has quite an unusual last name so when you hear it you can be pretty sure it’s the one you know.  Now, through the power of Facebook, I know that he’s a “Weekend radio presenter” on some regional station, among other things.

So fair enough, he’s not a nationally famous star, and he’s not even “celebrity” enough ever to be asked onto some Z list reality show with a bunch of other “famous” people you’ve never heard of. But he’s doing what he’s always wanted to do, and I bet that same penny that he’s fucking happy.

So, as I was saying. I envy those people. I envy Philip. Not because of his job, or anything else he may have in his life, but because of his focus, his... calling, for want of a better word. Because when you know what it is you actually want to do it’s a lot easier to achieve something. To be a success. If you don’t have that single minded goal to strive for there’s only really two things that can happen:

One is that you blindly fall into a career that you end up sticking with. You may well then focus all your energies on that career to try to make as much of a success of it as you can. It’s the kind of thing I imagine happened to most sales people, and middle management. Or you may just settle in and spend the rest of your life grafting away, happy and comfortable, the kind of people that spend their entire working life as a postman, bus driver, Taxi driver, etc. There’s thousands of this kind of job and I think this is the category that most people find themselves in.

The other thing that can happen is that you become a drifter. Never really settling into a career, never being content with whatever job it is you find yourself doing. Always looking for something else, something you can “be” rather than just “do”, but never actually finding it.

I am a drifter. But I’m not sure anymore that there is anything that I would be happy “being”. I’ve come close a couple of times, but because of my lack of drive and ambition, and just plain laziness, I didn’t follow it through, I didn’t “make it happen” as those people I envy would’ve done, as Philip did do. When it came time at secondary school, at the age of 13, to “choose my options” (pick what subjects I wanted to continue studying towards a qualification) I firmly believed, and had done for some time, that I wanted to be a vet. So I chose my subjects accordingly; biology, physics, and chemistry. The following year, when it was time to knuckle down and study my chosen subjects, I lost all interest in academic pursuits, preferring instead to bunk off school and do my own thing. Oddly enough I still somehow managed to learn more in that time than many of my contemporaries.

After having a dozen or so jobs, none of which I lasted more than three weeks in, I realised I kind of screwed up my life. Having spent much of my teenage years tinkering with various gadgets (I was well known in school, on the occasions I did turn up, for being able to fix walkmans) I decided to enrol at college on an electrical engineering course. The only other time I’ve come close to devoting my life to a career was during my two years on that course: We had a presentation one day by a lecturer from Reading University. The presentation was on their Cybernetics department and I was enthralled. Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to do. For the first, and only, time in my life I could actually see myself in the future; a future that involved cutting edge development in cybernetics. I saw myself working in high tech R&D labs, designing and building machines that would be sent into space to explore other planets. I found myself with a dream of developing the first ever self motivating robot with the ability of complete “bottom up” learning. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this was probably where my idea of a robot monkey butler was born. Again, my own impatience, laziness, and stupidity stepped in to save me from having a career that would’ve taken over my life and given me a sense of achievement. I still had a third year to go at college to gain my diploma, and then the Reading university cybernetics course would be another four years (at least). My parents couldn’t afford all the costs and fees of five more years in full time higher education, and I didn’t qualify for a grant. A part time job was the only option left open to me, and I was far too lazy for that. I do regret not going for it, but I also know that with the course, the commute, and a part time job I would’ve struggled immensely just to keep up.

I didn’t finish the course, I didn’t get my diploma. At the start of my third year at college I had the opportunity of a full time job at IBM and unfortunately I took it. I lasted a year there servicing printers and EPOS machines before making the mistake of telling the manager that he was wrong. Since then I’ve worked at a variety of companies with a varying degree of what career people would call success; I’ve been a relatively large fish in a very small pond (I say small pond, it was more of a puddle really, a dirty little stagnant puddle owned by an unlikeable egregious twunt) and I felt stressed, over worked, underappreciated, and deeply, deeply unhappy. There was one saving grace for the just short of eleven years I spent at that wretched company and that was the people I worked with. Given that the owner/MD was such an overwhelming arse meant the company had a huge staff turnover. In fact my not quite eleven years there made me the longest surviving non director, which obviously contributed greatly to my meteoric rise to almost near the very top of the puddle. Because of that staff turnover I met and became friends with a lot of people, only to eventually lose contact after they moved on. There are two people though, I have managed to stay in regular contact with; one of them is now my monthly drinking buddy, without whom I’d almost never have a night out. He’s a lovely guy and I always look forward to our monthly drinks. The other is one of those rare people you click with instantly (although apparently I wasn’t very nice to her in the beginning). She is now someone I count as a best friend, and is one of my favourite people in the entire world. Those two people, along with all the others I’ve now lost contact with, mean that those very nearly eleven years climbing the step stool of success weren’t a complete waste of time.

Now I’m just small fry again, working for a test and maintenance equipment hire company, in which I’m a pretty insignificant little fish quietly going about my business, and that suits me fine. I have no desire to be a manager again. I do my job as best I can and I try not to get involved beyond that (although it seems my bosses have a little more ambition for me). I did volunteer to go on a course which has led to me becoming a certified thermographer, something I’m actually quite proud of. From the moment I first picked up a thermal camera that I was fascinated by the whole concept of thermal imaging and the possibilities that it holds. But thermography is just a very small part of my job and even then I don’t get to use my freshly gained knowledge in a practical way. To me the most interesting application for thermal imaging is in research and development. One of the industries we quite regularly hire thermal cameras to is nature filming (we’ve recently hired a camera to the Autumn Watch team to film geese I believe), and that would be an ideal field of research for me. I very much doubt there’d be enough work to pay the mortgage though, let alone the forty or so thousand pounds a top of the range camera would cost me.

I hated being a manager, and I’m bored being a drone. So is there anything out there I enjoy doing that I can actually make a living from? I enjoy travelling, but no one’s going to pay me to sling a bag on my back and schlep off around the world visiting sites of historical/cultural/architectural interest. I enjoy writing but I’m under no illusion that I’m good enough to make a living from it. Besides which, the writing business is full of deadlines, and deadlines, as this very sporadically written blog attests to, aren’t a concept I can get behind. I enjoy playing video games, and there ARE ways to make money from playing video games. Tournament gamers can make vast sums of money, but I just enjoy playing games, I’m not particularly competitive at it and would NEVER be able to compete at a tournament level. Friends have suggested that I combine writing with one of my other pastimes; travel writing, or game reviews - even just to get free games. But it still involves my nemesis, DEADLINES! (Damn you deadlines!) I tried writing a post about my holiday in Malta in July, but half of it turned into a rant about birthday presents, and the other half is still sitting in my drafts folder with one paragraph written that quickly descends into a rant about package holidays (I do enjoy writing a good rant).On the game reviewing front, I had plans to write a retrospection of the recent ICO & Shadow of the Colossus HD release; that’s still very much at the plan stage I’m afraid, a month after it came out. That doesn’t bode well for writing reviews which should be published no later a couple of days after release for it to stand a chance amongst the thousands of other people churning them out.

My lackadaisical approach to personal development means I’ll very likely always be a drifter. I’m always going to be dissatisfied with whatever job I find myself doing, but I will still always do it to the best of my ability. And just the fact that I’ve managed to find work for all of my adult life means that I’m a bloody successful drifter. Maybe that has been my vocation all along. It’s unlikely though that I ever will get my mum that big bloody boat...