This story is probably going to get told pretty out-of-order because there’s the story of how it came to be, and there’s the story of what’s happening now, and I don’t want to miss out on telling you about interesting things that are happening now just so I can obsessively chronicle the last five months of backstory, which probably won’t be interesting to anyone but me anyway.
As some of you know, I have been living in Vancouver, Canada, for about the last ten years, and not really enjoying much of it. It’s a beautiful setting but the city’s been completely destroyed by frantic growth and offshore investment money, which both obliterated local culture and turned Vancouver into a giant money laundering hub, separating the real estate market from the local economy and increasing the cost of housing to something like 30x the average annual income. As a result, the whole city has developed this grim, desperate vibe – I often say that for a few years now, if I get into an elevator with another local, and there was nobody else in the elevator, they’d often ask, “you from here?” and then follow it up with “what are we going to do? I have to get out of this city.” It was grim.
For a few years now, consequently, I’ve been trying to get work on Vancouver Island. This was a pretty soul-destroying process in itself. In addition to working on the magazine, which is what people here might know me from, I also have a pretty decent career in the telecom business, building and fixing business systems…my employer is pretty large and I’m relatively well paid (for here, anyway…my equivalent somewhere like Comcast would make a lot more, I think) and it wasn’t a company I was looking to leave. For at least two years, then, I have been working hard to make myself a valuable employee that nobody could say anything bad about. I’ve always been fairly good at the work but I never used to have to put on a mask just to be there, but you know how it is.
I interviewed for thirteen different jobs trying to relocate to Vancouver Island, all panel interviews, and, obviously, I got rejected a lot. In fact, I got thirteen rejections. The biggest problem was the extreme local desirability of Vancouver Island. It’s a famously relaxed lifestyle and very difficult to get into a good job from the outside. Lots of the jobs I applied for, which are complicated jobs for which not that many people would be qualified, would have forty applicants. Over and over I got “first runner up”. The second to last interview, the whole panel came over from the island just to interview me, spent ninety minutes on the interview, took recommendations for me from everyone from my immediate supervisor to the regional director, who is about three levels up from the hiring guys, and at the end of the interview told it had been fantastic and that I’d done really well and that if they didn’t already have a guy who was getting the job, I’d definitely have been their top pick. It was tough.
The last interview I did, which I also failed, was kind of a hail mary. It was a little outside my specific area of expertise and it was also in a town I didn’t really know much about. I grew up on Vancouver Island but it’s a big place and I had just never really been to this town but I was willing to take a stab at anything. The interview went pretty well but not great; I’d just had the “gee if only we didn’t already have a guy” interview two days before and I was pretty wrecked on interviews. In fact at that time I think I’d done six interviews in four months. I honestly didn’t even really want the job, just the location. But I gave it everything I could. The head guy called me the next day to say they were giving it to another guy who they’d already worked with a lot.
The funny thing was that in order to have the minimum panel size for the interview, they’d asked this guy I’d never heard of, from some other department, to sit in, just to make quorum or whatever. He asked no questions but listened intently. Three days after the interview he called me.
“Look,” he said, “do you know anything about my department? We do planning and design. It’s brain central. I think you’d like it. Do you want to come work for me? The region you just applied in needs someone in charge of the planning and design. It’s expanding fast. You’d have your own little kingdom up there.”
“That sounds amazing,” I said. “I don’t want to sound mercenary, but how is the pay? I’ve heard the planners and designers are underpaid.”
“The entry level guys are,” he said. “Do you think you’re an entry level guy?”
“Well,” I said, “It’s just hard for me to imagine that you would hire me for a fairly different skillset than I typically perform at work, and take me on in a more senior role.”
“It’s a lot of thinking, a bit of interpersonal, and a lot of written communication,” he said. “A technical guy with a deep telecom background, with a lot of writing experience. Isn’t that you? We can teach you the CAD stuff. That's no big deal.”
“That certainly is me,” I said. I list nothing on my resume about any work in the arms industry for all kinds of reasons, but it’s not hard to find out, of course. But this was the first time anyone had implied they knew, let alone that it would be an asset.
And so he swore me to secrecy on my pay scale to avoid internal conflicts with longer term people, sent me a written offer, and I took the job.
I had a couple of weeks to try to get organized for the move, but the move wasn’t going to be simple: I was moving to…homelessness, starting February first. As a guy with no planning or design experience, they couldn’t put me in the soup on day one, so I agreed to work in Victoria, BC, for a few weeks or months - it was a bit vague - getting things figured out. I have family there but I’m not very close to them, exactly. It would mean a lot of sleeping in the 4runner and going back to Vancouver on the weekends and packing. I thought it would take me maybe two months to get the Vancouver side wound down, although I had no idea what Erin would do. Still, she was also committed to the idea and it was obviously a step up for me work-wise and it meant finally getting out of Vancouver and into the desirable Vancouver Island life, so I packed some stuff into the old Toyota and off I went. I had grown a beard the year before when I got super busy building a little rowboat in my apartment while trying to wrap up an issue of the magazine outside of my regular job and just stopped shaving, and I felt I was ready to put my stuff in a storage locker and embrace the homeless lifestyle.
So here is me, having begun to fill a storage locker, and trying to embrace my new life. Note rickety bicycle and a shirt sporting the logo of an optics brand the poors use.