Last week I sat down and words just fell out of me, I was able to write for over an hour without stopping, without even thinking about stopping. Tonight, I felt like I wanted to write, I sat down in front of my laptop and tried to write out my thoughts about the gig I went to on Saturday night. I got 300-400 words in and could tell that not only was it not good, it wasn’t as easy to write it out as last week.
I dont know exactly know what the difference is between then and now. But whatever I had in me last week to write, isn’t here right now. In an attempt to keep writing on a regular basis however, I’m going to push myself to write this, no matter how bad this blog ends up being.
This is a perfect example of the self doubt I was talking about last week, it plagues me. Again, as I’m sure it does everyone.
I think too much about what I’m doing, then the doubt kicks in.
“Will this be good enough for people to enjoy reading?”
“No-one gives a fuck about what’s on my mind or what I have to say”
“Your writing is terrible and you should stop”
“What’s the point of any of this”
The usual stuff that runs through my head when I’m doing anything creative, whether it be writing this, or doing the podcasts. How to get it out of my head? Success? Well that would be nice, but it makes me wonder if this same feeling would still exist if anything I did was to be successful. Lets hope for my sake and my sanity, that I’m able to find out.
December 2005
I sat on a balcony overlooking a bunch of trees and ocean as far as you could see, beer in my left hand, feet up on the railing of the balcony, an Esky full of beer separating my myself from Shaun, it was around day 8 of a complete bender.
We had been drinking for eight days, drinking far too much, sleeping too little, your normal schoolies story.
High school was over, to us, there was no better thing to do than get complete fucked up to celebrate.
12 of us had been crammed into this house for over a week, early in the week was filled with general craziness and chaos around the house. the thing that I think that was different between Shaun and myself and most other people that go on schoolies. We didn’t go out to pubs to drink, we drank at home, so when schoolies had come around I wanted to stay in this house and drink.
By this stage, day eight, every chair in this rented house was broken, every glass smashed in a competition of who could smash the most off the balcony, two of the fences around the house broken, various alcohol spilled into the carpet and nearly every framed picture in the house either sprayed with beer or ready to fall off. My hand poorly wrapped up because the night before Shaun and I had an argument and I punched a hole through the wall, a hole which we later covered up with a lamp.
So, it was day eight, feet up on the railing, staring out at the ocean, thinking to myself for the first time
“What the fuck do I do now?”
People at school knew what they wanted to do, knew the courses they wanted to enrol in and had a fairly good idea of what kind of career they wanted.
Me, I had absolutely no idea. Do I have an idea now? Not really, but I have a better idea now than I did five and a half years ago.
I had just quit my part-time job of two years, where I had life changing moments, working with two guys who I will never, ever forget, two guys who taught me one of the most important lessons I will ever learn at my job. They taught me, that any job you do isn’t boring, you can always have fun.
Did we fuck around? Yes.
Did we still get everything we needed to do done? Yes.
We worked pretty hard, in my opinion anyway, well harder than a lot people that worked there, but there was never a dull shift working there, packing fruit, telling ridiculous stories, listening to music so loud that people out in the shop could hear.
Most of all, we were having fun, well, at least I was anyway. I will tell stories about this job another time.
February 2006
After the hangover of a two week binge had finally gone away, I was speaking with my uncle to see if he knew of any call centres that I would be able to put my resume in at. He gave me a contact and I had a job interview the following week.
I got the job, and was sitting in a call centre a 50 minute drive from home, surrounded by people from completely different backgrounds, talking to people on the phone, my main objective – get these motherfuckers to buy something.
Over the next few months I met a bunch of people that I really liked, people I thought were funny and interesting people, but, jesus, did I meet a lot of idiots and weirdos. More than I would like to remember, but those are stories for a different time.
A year into the job, still feeling uncomfortable and worried I didn’t fit in with all these people I worked with, staff started getting laid off, or rested, as in, we don’t have any work for you now….or perhaps ever. It got to December, there were 4 or 5 of us left from a staff of about between 60-80.
All the normal campaigns for selling stuff had dried up over the holidays, school finished, people went away, there aren’t many people left at home to sell shit to. Makes sense.
We were selling, I use that term very loosely, we were offering free internet to people in rural areas, I believe it was part of some government initiative, I’m not sure to be honest, because the only thing on my mind, was doing well enough to to join the 70 other people who had been ‘rested’.
I sat down with two guys I hadn’t really met before, I had seen them around the office for the last 10 months or so, but never really chatted with them, even though they had been there a lot longer than myself.
After the first day of working with them, I knew going into work every day was going to be fun. All these two would do, is sit there and insult each other all day, friendly jibes for the most part, but at times it would get heated and they would be at each others throats.
After a while, one of these guys left the company, he would come back a few years later.
The other guy (Rudda, a Sri Lankan gentleman, one of the most good natured people I have ever met) and myself had moved into different roles in the company, I was team leading and he was taking inbound calls.
We got to know each other pretty well over the next year or so while we were in the different departments, talking a lot of crap, trying to make each other laugh. Another guy had started at this time, Graz.
Rudda, Graz and I, share very similar senses of humour, which was never a problem, that is, until I was moved out of my position of team leading into the inbound call centre team.
From pretty much the first day I hit that team it was fun, I was having fun at work. More fun than I had ever had at work before. Taking calls ALWAYS came second to our stupid games, jokes, stories. Anything we could think of to make sure the eight hours we were stuck in this brightly coloured were never dull.
They never were. We would antagonise each other for hours and hours on end, see who could annoy the boss the most, who could say the most disgusting thing they could think of.
Most people would have had this kind of relationship with people they work with I think, this is just my own personal experience. So hopefully most people are on the same wavelength as me here.
If you spend eight hours a day with someone, five days a week and you share interests or enjoy each others company, you are pretty much forced to be friends. We hung out after work, we called each other and annoyed each an hour after work was over. To me, it was never too much, maybe it was for these guys, but it wasn’t for me. I had so much fun when I was at work, I didn’t want to stop talking to them.
The stories the three of us share from working in that place are a huge part of my life, I have five years worth of stories from that job, but none of them anywhere near as important as when I worked with these two guys.
I don’t want this blog to start sounding like I’m trying to suck their dicks, who knows if they will even see it. I’m writing this for me, in an attempt to get some of my thoughts out of my head.
At some point in a blog I will share a bunch of these stories, but I dont know if I’m ready to yet, they are stories that have been retold time and time again, whether we are out to dinner, or if it’s just me telling them to my friends. But they are stories that one day I will be ready to type out and let people see.
These are two gentleman that mean a lot to me and again, managed to drill into me, that work can ALWAYS be fun.
I know that I will never have a job as fun as the job I had at Data-Active/Data-Response, and people can talk badly about the place all they want, as I have heard them do many, many times over the years, and while yes, it wasn’t always the best place to work, you can’t say you didn’t have a fucking fun time.
I had a fun time there. I know that I will never have a job where I have as much fun as I did there, I will certainly never be able to get away with the antics we pulled working there.
I didn’t think I would be able to write this much, but it got easier as I went along. Probably not as well written as last week, probably a bunch less interesting. But, hey, at least I’m writing.
