but at moments, i do question the worth of it all. when i was a developer i knew i could always go and find another job, or even another career. it might not require the long days and nights, might not have as heavy stress and could allow me time to focus on life not work. when i thought about this, i was normally under serious stress; deadlines looming with worried clients and code not working as expected. in these moments, i had visions of goose, asking maverick for the number to that truck driving school, so they could drive the big rigs. the idea of a less stressful life, one without a high speed pass on the tower just for the hell of it, was appealing.
but unlike goose, driving the big rigs was never for me. driving would get me to work, not be work itself. i always had monster drives, with clients who were 100 mi away from home, and who required serious face-time. that meant long cycles of living in hotels and commuting in all weather. NPR and mobile phones were the two saving graces of this, both allowing me to stay connected while mellowing on the move. but driving eliminated the two things i wanted to be spending my personal time on, learning an instrument and reading. i knew both where possible, i have a friend who kept a keyboard next to him as he commuted. he could practice one handed scales while he drove. i had other friends who listened to books on tape, but my books never seemed to be available. there was never a large enough market for the books i read, to be able to pay someone to read them to me.
i now live 20 minutes from the office, with a mostly empty road that allows me to drive twice the posted speed limit. this is my shortest commute since riding my bike to the beach, something i did because it gave me a total of 5 workouts a day. but, there are downsides, first NPR takes longer than 20 minutes for a full summary of the news and worse there is no NPR to listen to in malaysia. this is the country of no real news is the news; where a weather report is one worded as “hazy”.
other downsides are that i still don’t have time to learn an instrument or to read as much as i buy on frequent bookstore trips. the office has a collection of wanna-be guitarists and a wanna-be instructor. it also has very little time to move from talking about lessons to the actual lessons themselves. we keep threatening each other that now is the time to begin, yet-another-deadline is the only thing stopping us.
unfortunately, my reading habits are also still too eccentric for commercial recordings so i can read and drive at the same time. with the exception of david sedaris’ “santaland diaries” that i drove through a few months ago. they were the notebooks of a gay elf-with-attitude suffering through a holiday season in a department store. i loved listening to them, i am sure you can see the commercial appeal they would have. it was felt good to enjoy mainstream material.
there are moments when i think about doing other things. as i was driving to work last week i considered all the skills i have mastered over the years and how they would serve me well if i did what i have always threatened to do. as i said, i was never driven to drive the big rigs. the school of choice for me was barber school, where i would learn to cut hair and give a shave. barber school would allow me to run my own business, providing a service to customers, customers who continue to grow hair that needs to be cut. the worst mistakes could be corrected by waiting 8 weeks to allow it grow out.
other than the crying child, there for his first big boy haircut, there is little stress in the barber shop. it’s a place for men to hang out, listen to the news on the radio or a game on a small tv in the corner. it’s a place for men to socialize while waiting their turn for the chair; where everyone as equal as the egalitarian “regular boys haircut”.
it’s also a place where long gaps of time pass with little or nothing to do. which sounds like a great retirement gig for me. no nighttime conference calls, no stressful meetings where business people and lawyers discuss direction from 4 continents, no KPI for staff, no requirements harder than asking if it should be “tapered in back”. barber school has always been something i would pull out of my pocket like a set of worry beads. i would roll it around in my hand for a second, and realize that if i am too busy to read or pick up a guitar, then there is no way i have time for a two year training program that allows me to hang a red and white pole outside a storefront.
i love my job, there is still so much to do and learn. barber school just needs to wait until i retire, which will could be sometime after i have read the books waiting on two continents. besides, the days of the barber surgeon are sadly past. that was the job i would have enjoyed, it was when barbers were allowed to pull teeth and amputate body parts. my day-and-night career allows me to symbolically do both of those.
i already aggressively cut hair every day, what else could i want? other than NPR during my drive.
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can you image a barbershop i designed? pictures from around the world, bookshelves full of books to be shared, nice couches, good coffee and a wall mounted TV tuned to CNN or an EPL game. we would have open wi-fi and a PC in the corner so people could google, wiki or imdb answers to debates between patrons. clearly, the proprieties must be observed.
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