The road not taken?

I haven’t been that regular with my posts for the last month or so because I have had a lot on my plate.

A series of slip-ups and major bust-ups with the immediate boss, who wont accept that some of the slip-ups were caused by his failure to fully grasp what the assignments from above required, over the last 10 months have led to a situation where the office has been a truly nasty place for yours truly for the last few weeks.

After thinking long and hard, with the help of some intelligence gathered through my mole in the higher echelons of this organisation, I made the very difficult decision to tender my resignation letter and give in my notice.

After 3 weeks of pushing and shoving it was inevitably going to come down to a choice of who should leave, the boss or me. I realised that was one decision that was more than likely not going to favour my black ass so I made the pre-emptive move. This way I wont have a record of ever being fired.

I am beginning to think I did the right thing, under the circumstances, because everybody is falling over himself or herself to tell me that they will have my back should I need any positive recommendations in the future. To me this means they were going to fire me regardless of the merits of my defence and my resignation gave them an easy and guiltless way out of the problem.

I am not saying I am totally blameless but considering most of the time I was operating under some very misguided instructions, I should have been cut some major slack.

All this has me wondering how different my life would have ended up had I taken up my calling to become a broadcast journalist.

As a MassComm student I developed an interest in radio and TV broadcasting (I was looking for options with no written examinations) and under the initial tutelage of a chap called Murray Oliver I started churning out some pretty impressive assignments. In those days we didn’t even have a campus radio stations and editing suites, like the Countryboyi has, to help grasp the practical elements better. You do not know difficulty until you have attempted to edit a radio skit with only a microphone and a boombox with two tape decks

While still at university I worked for a while at a, now defunct, TV news agency. I liked the work but because I wasn’t being paid I quickly took my uncle’s offer for a job that I found uninspiring.

He had a PR consultancy firm and he had just won a really big job, which required him to get some extra staff. He wanted an assistant and since I was studying mass communication he figured I would do just fine. He also knew that he could pay me peanuts and I’d be happy.

It was the allure of a salary no matter how small (it was actually quite a sum for a university student) that started me on my journey down the “wrong” path. For once I had money to spend and since I was being paid weekly, had no real expenses to talk about, I found I was above the average income level of my classmates.

Almost a year later, after our finals, I was selected by my head of department for a 4 month internship with WBS which would almost certainly lead to fulltime employment. Being the myopic person I was, I turned the internship down. Why? Because I had just received a slight increase in pay and I didn’t see myself quitting what I had to work for 4 months without pay.

As with all consultancy work, the big juicy assignment was soon done and my uncle’s company found it hard to get any new contracts (at least none as good as the previous one). Company went broke after a while and I found myself doing all sorts of dull short-term research gigs, until I got my current job, which is (or was) also largely routine and administrative in nature.

As I sit here charting the carriers of my old team from the broadcast class, many of whom have gone on to better (more interesting at any rate) things, I can’t help but wonder what it might have been like had I stuck to what I liked.

But then again, maybe knowing I am going to be on the street in 28 days has me seeing things from an unhealthy perspective.