Working as a contractor for 20 years invariably teaches you some useful lessons and build up a personal Code of Conduct.
Finishing up at the Ministry of Coughs and Sneezes in February I broke two of my own rules :-
- Never accept a contract you’re not convinced you want just because it’s the only option available.
- Always take a break between contracts to give yourself chance to decompress and recharge.
I was too hasty and, given that the contracting market was unusually sluggish, I jumped onto a contract that was too far out of my comfort zone. A perfect storm of narrow focus on a single cloud service I had limited experience of, a large amount of interaction with end users and being ridden by a micromanaging Project Manager combined to rocket my stress levels up into the stratosphere.
Having to exit that contract early and abruptly left my confidence in tatters and forced me to rethink just what I want to achieve in life; “frustrated IT engineer” isn’t really what I had dreamed of as a callow youth.
If anything positive came out of that March Madness it shook me into getting back to my Big Dream which is to be a writer. Sounds laughable when you write it down, especially as a working class person trained from birth to have limited expectations in life, but hey someone has to fill those thousands of hours of TV right?
So at the moment I’m studying the basic “What Not To Do” via book and podcasts, learning how to use scriptwriting app Fade In and generally pulling together ideas. It’ll be a long-term project, with lots of scrunched up paper and rejection letters to go in the bin (or the electronic equivalent at least) but at least “frustrated sitcom writer” will look better on the tombstone than “frustrated IT contractor”.
And the good news is that I’m now back at work contracting to another Government agency, this time in my comfort zone, working amongst friendly people and non-micromanaging PMs and not having to deal with users. And when I finish this – I’M DEFINITELY TAKING A BREAK!
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