Anemone's Research Emporium

How my dream job didn't work out

But perhaps it was someone else's dream, not mine?

Anemone Cerridwen
April 3, 2009

Actually, I suppose I should just describe and analyse all my jobs. There isn't much to tell, alas. And even less to show for it financially. But perhaps someday all this will make a good story. Maybe. In the meantime perhaps this information will help someone else somehow.

I started my working life as a baby-sitter, as so many do. My brother and I baby-sat my younger sisters one evening a week starting when I was nine and my brother was eight. Then one summer (I think I was still nine) I was chief baby-sitter for the day at the cottage while the parents of our two families went to a meeting down the lake. We spent the earnings on junk food and got ourselves fairly queasy, though only one of us had to go home and lie down (the hippie chickie next door who wasn't used to the sugar, not me!). My drug use started early, as you can see. Baby-sitting money - don't let them have it. It will lead them to rack and ruin! (Or at least lots of cavities.)

Starting when I was sixteen, I baby-sat for two summers. The first summer I worked for a coworker of my mother's. She arranged the whole thing. The coworker/mom was home over the summer, but she wanted someone at hand so she could go off and do things and enjoy her holidays. So I took care of her 14-month-old and four-year-old sons. The four-year-old wasn't around much, since he was in summer day camp, so it was mostly the baby. After a while I got into the rhythm of it, and we were fine. The second summer my mother suggested I post an ad at the local grocery store, and I was almost immediately hired by a mom with a four-year-old boy and nine-year-old girl. The mom worked full time so I was in charge. I didn't see much of the nine-year-old, since she had a friend she went off with, but on the other hand we were sometimes joined by the four-year-old's friend from down the street. It worked out fine, since I liked doing fun things. I took the kids to the Museum of Nature both summers, and impressed them with the dinosaur skeletons (this was Ottawa, where the museums are cool, and back then they were free, too). I also took the kids to a movie the second summer. That gave me points. Everyone was super nice both summers.

The summer I was eighteen I worked as a bus girl (in French: aide-serveuse) at a resort owned by an uncle's company at Mont Tremblant. This was stressful, not just because I was working in a second language. I was very lonely living on location, and I had a hard time keeping up with expectations. I did work hard, though, and got points for that. I wouldn't do it again, though. My uncle gave me this job, without consulting me, really. I didn't feel like I could say no, so I took the job. I do think I should have thanked him after, just to be polite, but it didn't occur to me, since I was basically doing what I was told. I don't think he knew that. So I guess it was an opportunity that was wasted on me. Or maybe not. I don't know how you judge these things.

The two summers after that I was a geological assistant working for my aunt in Northern Ontario, hired as a last minute replacement for a local girl who was spooked by the quiet. I loved the quiet. The bugs and rain weren't so hot, and it wasn't paleontology, which was what I really wanted to do, but what could I do? I couldn't say no. And I must say that my aunt was a great person to work for in many ways. Exactly the kind of person you want as a mentor, if you want to work in the same field she's in (I didn't, but she did show me the ropes for what I was doing). I needle-duffed (collected samples of spruce needles) both summers and split core the first summer. I mostly enjoyed myself. I liked the macho-ness of it. Did you know that fly dope (insect repellant) melts plastic?

I worked as a geological assistant for a third summer as well, but this time for a friend of the family who was at the Geological Survey of Canada. We spent the summer touring Atlantic Canada coring lakes for palynological research. I did ok, but not great. I think I had a hard time keeping up with what they wanted from me, and not just socially.

Then I moved to Alberta for grad school, and worked at a Mac's convenience store the first summer. This was the first job I actually got for myself, and it was about at the level I was actually at. Then I got lucky and got a teaching assistantship (teaching/marking labs) at the last minute, so I was able to concentrate on my studies. I found TA-ing to be very hard, especially the first year when I was TA-ing third year labs and lacked the expertise. Also, communication broke down with the person I was TA-ing with. The next year I switched to a first year lab, and did much better. The second year I also worked at a grocery store for four months (a store a roommate worked at when I first met her) to help pay off some debts. Then I taught geology to high school students in two short courses my final summer there, while finishing my masters, and then I was on my own.

My first job after I finished my masters was in a second hand bookstore. (Oh, wait - traumatic amnesia! First I did one day as a telephone soliciter, with people smoking in the room, and a week or two as a car wash cashier - too social an environment, plus people smoking in the room.) I lasted a year at the bookstore, which is a long time for me. Loved the person I worked under. Hit it off with one of the book scouts. Didn't feel comfortable around the owner. In the end I fell apart and had to quit. Then I worked in a luggage store for a few months and then went back to school. A year on student loans while studying psychology, then a few months earning a pittance at H&R Block (times were slow), and back to Ontario.

My first Ontario job was a five month stint at the Petawawa National Forestry Institute, doing desktop publishing for someone on maternity leave. I had just enough experience on a Mac (from grad school) to squeak into that job. I was offered another temp job after that at the same place, but it would have been too much for me, answering phones and dealing with people. Then after a year-and-a-half on UI and welfare, I got my dream job as a file clerk at Canada Student Loans. This job enabled me to pay off my own loans rather than default on them. It was here, while we were discussing people being allowed to default if they were disabled, that it occurred to me for the first time that I might qualify for a disabled designation (no diagnosis at this time).

Then after sixteen months at this dream job, I crashed and burned, and had to quit. Basically I just got too tired to keep going. After about two-and-a-half years on welfare, going on disability for the first time after the first year, I sold everything and moved to Vancouver. In Vancouver I temped: two weeks putting up Christmas decorations; one day being pretty useless at an office; then five months in a credit card processing centre and ten months at a high tech company. Then crash and burn again and back on welfare. Which is where I am now.

As far as getting jobs goes, obviously it's much easier when family members and friends of family just give you jobs. But I found that that didn't help me in the long run because I wasn't in the driver's seat, and all I was getting out of it was money. I truly think I would have been better off looking for volunteer work in something that meant something to me personally, or at least spending time at the library trying to figure out what I cared about, instead of working in jobs other people chose for me. Later on, it was easy to get jobs that required clerical tests (the government, the temp agency), because I do well at those. The Mac's store job I got because it was near where I lived and I went back in person to follow up (my phone wasn't hooked up yet). The bookstore job was advertised in the paper. The luggage store had a sign in the window. I learned a bit having to find jobs on my own, but in the end that didn't work either, since I was still looking for other people's idea of a job, not my own.

The jobs that worked the best for me (bookstore, file clerk) were the ones where they said the first week "We don't mean to insult your intelligence, but we have to tell you everything, otherwise you won't know what to do, since it's so specialized". In the short term I thrived in these structured jobs. In the long run, the bookstore didn't work out because I had nowhere to go. I felt like I was climbing the walls, once I got the hang of it, and it was tiring wrestling my hungry brain into submission all the time. The file clerk job fell apart for me probably mostly because it kept changing. Every few months the mix of people I had to work with changed, and it was exhausting starting over, since it made it a new job for me each time. Even though the people were mostly great, I couldn't keep up with the changes new people would bring in. Initially I held it together, and I think having debts to pay off helped, but after I was debt free I got so tired I had to start using vacation time and sick time to shorten my work week. But then that wasn't enough and I had to quit. The treadmill kept going too fast and I couldn't keep up.

In theory, the high tech company I temped at in my final temp job should have been heaven. I mean, I have a high IQ, am autistic, and an INTJ to boot. And the work was interesting enough that it helped take the edge off the stress (though I can go into flow doing filing, too, you know). So what went wrong? Well, basically, high tech companies are enclaves of engineers, not geeks. Most engineers are fairly normal males who run in packs, as males do, and have the usual pecking order. It's a highly competitive field, one women are not particularly welcome in. I mean, they're trying to replace traditional women's work with computer programs (and doing a good job of it, too), because obviously a computer program is superior to a secretary. Women's work, eeuuuw! I was not the only women who was not thriving there. I suspect women who thrived were far fewer in number than women who burned out. In the end they never really saw me as someone to invest in. So they didn't. So I failed. I think autism is only a real advantage in high tech if you have (a) a university degree in a relevant field and (b) a penis (or you can fake having one - the more androgynous you are, the better). Cute girls need not apply, especially if you're smarter than the boys.

But what about my education? I majored in geology for my first two degrees, because I didn't think I was allowed to major in anything girlier. I mean, I'm exceptionally gifted, and everyone knows (or so I got the message) that smart people go into math and science. And if they don't, I guess they're not that smart. (Someone should sit high school students down and explain that psychology is a lot more difficult than physics.) So I went into the one somewhat-hard science I hadn't already done to death in high school, and got lots of electives in religious studies on the side. In some ways I loved geology because it is so mythic (Darwin and all that), especially in Canada, a country that is mostly untameable wilderness. You know, Indiana Jones with snow. But I wasn't able to make the transition to working in the field (or even going to a PhD) and I think the main reason for that is that I just wasn't on the same wavelength as the people already established in the field. Geology-the-job is just too impersonal for me. I went into science to make society happy, and they expected me to feel liberated, and I didn't. I wanted them to be happy. They wanted me to be happy. Classic divorce scenario. Happened a lot to women my age - nothing to do with autism, everything to do with social role expectations. Having more time to study might have helped me get into a PhD program, since I would have had more time to assimilate what I was doing, but I doubt it would have made any difference in the long term, since I don't care enough about the right things to be there in the first place.

My second major was psychology, which is a bit closer to my core interests, since it's more human-oriented. But coming into it from geology was a shock. It's much more conformist than geology (indoor sciences are like that) and they even want you to write your introductions first and use passive voice (no-nos in geology, especially the second one). I felt like I had to dumb myself down too much to continue, though I did love Piaget when we got to him. Also, I didn't have enough time to absorb what I was learning. If I had I would have switched over to Piaget from abnormal psychology, and probably done better. But you know, the final straw wasn't being asked to write my introduction first - to a study testing a null hypothesis (so non-complexity theory!) no less. It was having to go to a potluck with the other honours students. The social demands were too much, and that's when I folded. I dropped out of honours, finished out my term, got a general degree more by luck than planning, and left school more or less for good.

Since my last job (at the high tech company) didn't work out, nine years ago, I've been at home, writing and wrestling with employment issues. I've written a book but don't know how to sell it (it's not exactly conventional). I've done research on some things, taken a few acting classes, written a few screenplays (two in rewrite mode), and wrestled with this whole "I never wanted to be a writer but that's all anyone will let me do" thing. What I really want to do is be an action hero in movies (I'm not too old - look at Yoda!), but I don't have the cash to get the training I'd need. So I don't know what's going to happen. I suspect that film is the one industry where I can be a geek and an artist and an action-oriented mystic all at the same time without feeling like a freak, but we'll see. It is terribly male-dominated, and I'm not sure how to do an end run around that. I do know, though, that if I'm going to succeed, then whatever I do has to come from inside. Because if I don't already know what the job is for, no one else is going to explain it to me. And that is where failure comes from. At least for me.