The Right Track

I'm not the idol of millions. Kids don't line up to get my autographs or purchase sketches of my characters. These days, I create more art with a few clicks of a mouse than I do with a pencil, and instead of creating superheroes I'm creating advertisements for a variety of products. I like working in an office though, sitting at a computer and filling one daunting blank page after another with colors, shapes, and fonts. My career track didn't run in a straight line, and certainly not the course I predicted, but ultimately I'd say I'm content.

When choosing a major in college, I was motivated by more than the desire to create that which interested me. Even as a teenager, I realized most of us will spend more time at a job than at home, and I knew picking something I'd enjoy was as important if not more important than a fat paycheck. I've since wavered in that position over the years, but still believe the principle to be sound. I wouldn't want to be wealthy if it meant being miserable and stressed out, but any day I'll take a decent salary for work I like over a low salary for work I love.

My driver's education instructor, “Uncle Al”, thought I was mad when he learned I was majoring in art and had a four year average of 98/100 in mathematics and had taken advanced calculus. He wasn't really my uncle, but insisted we all call him that, so his credibility in career advice was questionable, especially given his profession. Sure, he had controls on the passenger side of his car as well, but kids are crazy.*

Looking back, did I make the right call? Am I in the right field, or general vicinity of where someone like me should be? Antick Musings had an interesting career meme that I decided to try:

1. Go here: http://www.careercruising.com/default.asp
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top results.

I found the quiz link in the upper left after logging in, and proceeded to answer 39 questions about my likes and dislikes. Some were blatant in which jobs they were referring to, but I'm not sure how much that skewed the results. I know I wouldn't want to be in an operating room or chasing criminals down an alley. I don't want to work nights and weekends, and I don't want to memorize law or history tomes. After getting my initial results, I took the option to answer another 54 questions and refine my results. I have to say it painted a pretty accurate portrait of who I am, and the top ten especially reflect my interests. There are different things I could be doing, but they all involve art and/or computers, so it's nice to see I'm basically on the right track.

1. Video Game Developer

2. Computer Support Person

3. Website Designer

4. Business Systems Analyst

5. Computer Animator

6. Artist

7. Computer Network Specialist

8. Animator

9. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator

10. Illustrator

11. Film Editor

12. Computer Engineer

13. Web Developer

14. Desktop Publisher

15. Computer Programmer

16. Database Developer

17. Multimedia Developer

18. Technical Writer

19. Electronics Engineering Tech

20. Data Entry Clerk

21. Computer Trainer

22. Composer

23. Interior Designer

24. Craftsperson

25. Camera Operator

26. Optical / Ophthalmic Lab Technician

27. Electrical Engineering Tech

28. Electrician

29. Avionics Tech

30. Set Designer

31. Office Machine Repairer

32. Special Effects Technician

33. Model Maker

34. Jeweler

35. Bookbinder

36. Cable Installer and Repairer

37. Drafter

38. Film Processor

39. Security Systems Technician

40. Dental Lab Tech

* * * * *

* (I know someone else ran a light and hit B13, but those photos did too good a job illustrating my point not to link them. And B13 was a crazy kid, even if that accident wasn't his fault. ;))

Career Tracks 6: Live Free or Balboa

I don't often write about my career for several reasons. Besides the potential of being a horrendously boring topic for anyone outside my field, there's the ever present risk of being ”Dooced” and losing my job for something I wrote on the internet. I'll allude to vague work things as they relate to my personal life, but one never knows when even one wrong word will have dire consequences. So even though I don't use my real name, nor would I ever name a company I worked for, I'm still apprehensive to approach the subject. Though the subtlest hints may have slipped in to posts over the Summer, I managed to avoid letting on that my position had been eliminated.

Layoffs are a scary but inevitable part of the business world. While most people advocate changing jobs often as a matter of increasing one's salary and growing in a career, I think a person potentially risks playing “layoff roulette” by staying anywhere too long. Sooner or later, a bullet might have your name on it, figuratively speaking. I had a great job though. My friends were excellent and my team was nearly perfect, a collection of editors, marketers, a writer, and a researcher all proficient and professional in their responsibilities. These people knew what they were doing and I could always count on them. I was happy, and I knew what I was doing. The unfamiliar is scary and, lacking a push, I might have stayed in the same place for the rest of my life.

I can't get in to why my position was eliminated, nor how many others fell. I can say that I was given very generous notice, and more than enough time to make preparations for my future. That “colleague” I mentioned, the one whose last day we were celebrating on Friday was of course me. It was hard to say goodbye, and I really do hope to keep in touch with the friends I've made over the past seven years.

On a happier note, I started a new job on Monday. I had a great first day, with one of the most thorough orientations I've ever experienced, complete with movies and a tour. My boss seems cool and, for the first time ever, I have my own office, which is as exciting as the free coffee, tea, and soda in our break room. It's the little things in life that make all the difference, and though it's only been one day and my workload has been manageable so far, I may already be a happy employee. There were a lot of friendly faces, and a barrage of names that may take years for me to remember. By the time I left my old job, though I might not have known all my coworkers personally, I could attach almost every face I passed in the hall with a name.

I wish I could say more, but confidentiality with my new employer gives me a new reason to be vague. I don't think saying “I lost my job at one great company but found another one at another great company” betrays any secrets, but those of you who know my secret identity understand my paranoia. Comments that divulge more than I've let on here may have to be deleted, so please be equally vague or contact me via e-mail instead.

It should prove to be an interesting and exciting week. Different systems and terminology loom before me, as does a ton of the usual new job paperwork. The previous occupant of my office left some challenges as well, such as a drawer full of sugar. I wouldn't have minded so much if it was in packets and not loose, but she also left a ton of pennies in there as well so the surprises weren't all bad. A lot of the people I met at my new job told me that people either stay for a year or two, or spend the rest of their careers there. It's too soon to know which category I'll fall into, but so far it's all good.

Career Tracks: The Final Nightmare

So there I was with the rest of the new Titans, facing off against their old enemy Deathstroke, when it hit me--I was no superhero. Instead I had merely brought home some trade paperbacks from work and was indulging in an old favorite pastime. And while I was enjoying Geoff Johns' stories and Mike McKone's art, I realized I had an epic of my own to finish.

Comics have definitely been the single greatest influence toward my decision to be a graphic artist. I set out with the intent of drawing Spider-man, and was just today telling one of my friends how the conductor on the train used to call me “Spider-man” back in high school, because I would always stop at the comic store before heading home and was always reading on the train. One year before my own college internship began, a friend of mine who was a year ahead was interning at Marvel. It was a dream come true when he recruited myself and two other comrades for a weekend freelance gig at 387 Park Avenue South. Marvel Zombie that I was, I was awestruck to be walking through those halls, each aisle adorned by street signs with names like “Yancy Street” taken from the comics they published. The office I work in now also has street names for our rows of cubicles, but names like “Pixel Pike” and “Layout Lane” just aren't the same.

The actual work we were doing there was basic Photoshop grunt work, silhouetting images of action figures for an upcoming toy catalog. For those not versed in photoshop, silhouetting involves drawing an outline called a clipping path around an image to cut it out of its background. Grunt work or no, to this day I'm glad to have my name listed among the credits of a Marvel publication.

A year later, I found myself in my own internship and after I graduated, that small design book publisher gave me a job. It didn't pay well, as I soon would realize, but in the four years I was there I gained a wealth of experience, both good and bad. As budget cuts made the already small operation even smaller, my duties extended beyond corrections, scanning and invitation designing. I was soon rating the quality of photographs and determining how large they could be used in a layout. I maintained a seven machine Macintosh network. I designed the company's bi-annual book catalogs. I hand-assembled 200+ page books from printer's proofs, so my supervisors had mock-ups to bring to trade shows. My X-acto and I were very glad the year they decided to print smaller samples of the books called blads. I made some new friends, even dated a copy-editor I'd met there for a good two years before a career opportunity took her to another state and eventually out of my life.

I began looking for work elsewhere, worried I would end up in my hometown forever in a low-paying job that wasn't exactly what I'd set out to do. It was a very good college friend, Rey, who pushed me to interview at a catalog company where he was employed designing Science Fiction catalogs. After meeting unsuccessfully with a headhunter I almost gave up, but nearly a year later he got me several interviews with people in the company, and before long my salary had doubled and my aspirations were renewed. I spent about three and a half years designing a catalog that featured a wide variety of books, from Steel to Grisham and many things in between. About a year and a half ago, my supervisor called me in and informed me that I was being reassigned to another club. My trepidation dissolved when she told me of an opening on the Science Fiction and Fantasy club.

I'm still not drawing Spider-man, but the tracks of one's career have as many surprise turns as a game of SIMS. As a plant-seller/ landscaper/musician/house-painter/gas station attendant/graphic artist/bartender/art director, I honestly can't fully predict where the road will take you and there are as many good surprises as bad ones. Right now I'm working with some famous illustrators, and with subject matter that appeals to me. Earlier this evening I was reading some of the very books we sell, so there certainly are fringe benefits. I'd like to thank anyone who's read this long entry in my five-part resumé, and apologize if I've rambled on overly long. Tomorrow look for something shorter and hopefully more(or less) meaningful. I think....

You can only plan so far ahead in life.

Career Tracks IV: The Quest for Peace

Working with Bahri at the gas station was an interesting experience. After his mom had died, he and his older brother had moved here to start a new life. What was merely a summer job for me, a way to make some money and keep my parents from calling me lazy, was his career and livelihood. I needed money to buy comic books; he needed it to pay the rent. A rivalry developed that I didn't notice at first. I tried to befriend him, and loaned him a duplicate copy of Uncanny X-men #248 when he complained of having nothing to read at home. The next day he complained about it being “kid stuff” and that I was a “leetle kid who needed to grow up!” A few years older than me, he often tried to take on an older brother role and tell me things like, “do not be shaving too high or you weel have hair on your cheekbones and always have to shave there!” His intentions seemed more about keeping me in line than actually taking me under his wing. Ravindra, one of my college friends, already played the role of “big brother” in my life by this point, and he at least was an intelligent guy. He would make fun of my drawings, but then take the time to show me what I was doing wrong. He saw that I had taught myself by looking at comics, and pointed out that I should learn REAL anatomy before getting into the stylized ideal reality portrayed in comics, and recommended some very good books from artists such as Burne Hogarth. Bahri used to call me a “dreamer” and say I would never, ever get a job as an artist.

No attractive female customer was safe from the inevitable inquiry of, “please geev phone numbar?” when Bahri was on the prowl. I remember one day in particular when he came to me dejected after one of these exchanges and asked me, “What ees fluttering?” I of course thought he meant the way a bird's wings moved and asked as much, so he clarified by explaining: “I ask for phone numbar and she say ‘thees ees fluttering but no.” What ees ‘fluttering' mean?” I smiled, now understanding in context, and broke the bad news to him.

As the summer of ’94 wound down, new employees were hired and assignments changed. I actually had some shifts where I didn't have to deal with Bahri, and some where we had a third man to help us cover the six pumps. Bahri cited one of these new hires as an examplary worker that I could learn from, since this gentleman would clean headlights without the customer asking, and occasionally got a good tip for his trouble. Of course, he was doing better than any of us realized. In those days, not all credit card transactions were electronic. We would take the card and put it under a carbon slip like a bank would use, and slid this device along a track that would transfer the raised numbers from the card. The owner would then sign this slip and get a copy of it. But what headlight guy would do is use two slips and keep one for himself. Ultimately he was caught, and thankfully modern technology makes that sort of thing harder to accomplish. Bahri was none too pleased to be wrong though, and I would occasionally bring the guy up just to get a rise out of him.

I stayed at the station well into October, working late shifts on the weekend. As the weather grew colder and basketball season approached, I eventually decided to quit since many weekends would require my presence at the games with the pep band, and it was now my senior year and last semester of classes. I needed to focus, and start thinking about an internship, which would count for my entire second semester's worth of credits. To my surprise, I actually found a publisher five minutes from my home. I got the internship, and soon found myself working alongside a graphic designer as she created various interior design and gardening coffee-table books for them. Of course the CEO of this humble 20-employee operation hated that term and insisted we call them “design books,” to maintain the level of class he wanted to portray. I did a lot of scanning images into the computer for the books, and a lot of corrections to existing designs from freelancers, but didn't get to create that many pieces myself. Occasionally they'd have a banquet or gala that needed an invitation designed, and they allowed me to handle those assignments. I learned a lot from the graphic designer while I was there, and from our supervisor Richard, who had been with the company from the beginning, even longer than the CEO who had only recently acquired it. My future seemed brighter every day, and I thought I might even have a great job in my field when I graduated. My dreams were all going to come true, and it seemed like always, Bahri was going to be proven very wrong.

Wasn't he?

To be concluded.

Career Tracks: Part III

They say one man's trash is another's treasure. Somewhere amid the vast wealth I surround myself with lies a laminated copy of the December 14th, 1986 edition of Newsday's Sunday Kidsday section. Clearly when I say “somewhere” I mean specifically inside an old toy chest dubbed the “storybox” after a chest on one of my childhood favorites, The Magic Garden. I may be a packrat, but I know where a surprising amount of things are in here. And while my name is listed along with the rest of my classmates who submitted stories and artwork for that edition, my artwork was not used and my article was bumped to the weekday black and white column, inexplicably using a crappy illustration by some kid from another school. I have copies of that article here as well, and mine was a poll titled “Comic Books are Still In.” In it, I asked 90 kids if they read comic books. 57 said yes, with 28 preferring Archie, 11 Whitman, 9 Marvel and 9 D.C. I was surprised the superhero comics didn't do as well and, at the naive age of 12, that I would have the kind of luck in which I would be the only one of my classmates not to be included in the full-color Sunday section. But I didn't care; my name had been published in something I read regularly, and it would be another seven years before I saw my name in a publication by one of those aforementioned comic book publishers. But that's a tale for another day.

After a long, hot day of painting we had stopped off at my manager's house for some iced tea. I was somewhat shocked when he left the kitchen and returned with a zip lock bag of weed. I was definitely horrified when his girlfriend dumped it out on a Kidsday lying on the table, tore off a strip, and began rolling a joint in something I read regularly and cherished as a child. They offered me a puff, but I politely declined, suddenly remembered having to be somewhere else, and excused myself. I guess that explained how my manager could be older than the rest of us, supervising a group of college students painting houses and businesses, and yet still live with his mom. Then again, I suppose it's theoretically possible for someone who's never even tried any kind of drugs to be sitting home alone on a Saturday night pushing thirty and writing a blog entry in his parent's house. In theory. At any rate, the rest of that summer was uneventful, with the crew passing a blunt around as far as I knew on one other occasion painting a wealthy client's isolated home in one of the wealthier areas near where I lived. Again I declined when they offered, and at the end of the summer I was glad to leave the job and return to school. Whatever job I took the following summer, it certainly wasn't going to be with that crew.

Between my junior and senior year of college I worked in a Texaco station pumping gas on a six hour shift that paid five dollars an hour. Generally I worked from noon until six PM, although occasionally I pulled the earlier 6AM-noon shift and by the end of the summer, the much cooler 6PM-midnight shift. None of the six pumps had automatic stops so if someone wasn't filling up completely, I had to make sure to disengage the catch before I gave them too much. Even with two of us manning the pumps, it was a lot of running around, especially on Wednesdays when a discount on premium had the cars lined up around the block. The station may have been in a wealthy area, with clients who often paid more attention to their cell phones than us, but they loved their cheap gas. Running around in the heat for these people was exhausting, but there was a Dairy Barn next door and their two-quart iced tea was a lifesaver--and my lunch. It was a slim and trim 150 pound MCF that arrived for his senior year of college, and I was in the best shape of my life that summer.

The job was demanding, but at first didn't seem to have any of the criminal elements of my last job. Besides pumping gas and checking oil, we would check the level of the tanks at the end of the evening shifts and set up the flags and oil displays at the start of the morning ones. My partner was usually a Turkish fellow named Bahri who had moved here after his mom died. He seemed nice enough at first, but seemed to grow annoyed with me as my confidence grew. I recall one day when we had the morning shift and I had some uncharacteristic energy. I had put out all six flags by myself and changed the price cards in record time, and when I bounded back in the office and asked if he was ready for the day he snapped at me, “You think you are most so high!” which left me bewildered. It was neither the first nor last misunderstanding we would have, and he would often be proven wrong on many things, such as the character of some of our co-workers...

Tune in next time, when I reveal how easy it used to be to steal someone's credit card without them even realizing it...

Career Tracks: Volume 2

“You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!"

Wait...I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself since I don't think my friend Mike had introduced me to The Wall by this point in the story, and in fact this isn't one of THOSE stories....

No, when we last left our mysterious cloaked high school senior, MCHSS had been caught slacking on the job. The Brother's eyes blazed with fury as my hockey playing co-workers froze and I jumped down from my perch on the lockers. “YOU! YOU, YOU and YOU!!! Monday, report to the PRINCIPAL's OFFICE!” I was screwed.

The rest of that evening, I cleaned the windows of the school in a daze, dreading telling my parents when they arrived at 10PM to pick me up from work. They were surprisingly understanding as I stammered out the tale, and the real apprehension lay ahead in the form of a visit to the principal's office. It was a LONG weekend.

It was an even longer Monday, as I put off the dreaded visit until the very end of the day. The principal was far more reasonable than the other Brother who had caught us, and ultimately after I offered that he dock my pay rather than give me any demerits and ruin my record, he let me off with just a warning. I would be able to finish my high school career with an untarnished record after all.

The summer before I started college I took a driving course. The instructor, who insisted we all call him “Uncle Al” even though no one in the class was a relative, was surprised to hear that with a four-year Math average of 95% I was not in fact going to become an accountant, but rather would be majoring in Graphic Design. I had continued drawing in high school and been one of the few active members of the art “club”, sad in that it was really just four or five of us who hung out after school, drew, and didn't actually talk to each other. But it counted as an extracurricular activity nonetheless, and while I still wasn't Todd MacFarlane, John Byrne, or even Erik Larsen, my confidence had improved to the point that I was going to try. Plus, playing Baritone Horn in the pep band was going to earn me a scholarship to cover half my tuition, and get me in to all the basketball games at Madison Square Garden for free. Go Red Storm!

Majoring in art was harder than I thought, and juggling basketball games and band rehearsals was never easy. Many a late night was spent in my basement studio after a game, working with gouache to the break of dawn to get colors just right for a particularly discerning professor. I didn't have much time to work, although in the summer my father and I played together in a fire department band, so parades provided some spending money. It wasn't enough though, so in the summer after my sophomore year I applied for a job as a “Triple-A Student Painter”.

It was an interesting job, and I suppose I could stretch and say it was my first art job. Part of it involved being a door-to-door salesman though, and I had to knock on doors and ASK people if they wanted their house painted. If they weren't home we had a calling card to hang on their doorknob with a photo of a painter-kid my mom thought looked like me. It was a summer fraught with challenges, of heavy ladders and skin cracking from turpentine. I briefly entertained a crush on my manager's girlfriend who was on our crew but once I learned she was with him, and a smoker, that died out quickly enough. I don't know what the worst part of the job was. Maybe it was the time I had to varnish the trim of a roof near a hornet's nest while lying on a ladder that at anytime could have slid off the roof. Perhaps the gas station we painted and me lying on the edge of a hot tar over hang in the blazing sun. Or maybe, just maybe, it was that marijuana incident....

It goes almost without saying, but....to be continued...

Career Tracks: Episode I

Anyone who has ever played The SIMS knows that each Sim can follow various career paths with interesting twists and turns. An actor starts out as a waitress. A superhero has to put in some time as a security guard and a cop first. Some rungs in the various ladders are logical; others less so. And yet life imitates art.

I always LIKED drawing; I just never felt I was very good at it. As I child I would try to impress the girl next door and the other kids in the neighborhood by feigning scientific genius culled from all the cartoons I had watched. There was the time I had them mash leaves in water-filled beach buckets calling it “protoplasm” and explaining that we were in fact creating life. Or the time we tried to build a time machine using an extension cord, a magnifying glass, a Hot Wheels® car, a battery pack, a no parking sign and ants. I don't think they really believed that the ants who “disappeared” had in fact traveled through time, any more that we could do the same if I could only solve the roadblock of shrinking ourselves small enough to fit in the Hot Wheels car. I had a vivid imagination, but science wasn't the ladder I would eventually climb.

I had always doodled, but in third grade I had a few friends who were amazing artists. I tend to be a little competitive sometimes, so I would try to draw a better Voltron or Optimus Prime than they could. I would lose every time I competed, but I kept working on it long after all my friends had outgrown that sort of thing. I even started making my own comic characters, undeterred when classmates made fun of some of my lamer creations, like Speed Stick, a running stick figure with a lot of speed lines trailing behind it. One of those aforementioned gifted artist friends, whose specialty was drawing Bumblebee, lampooned my creation by drawing his own variation, adding breasts, and calling it “Lady Speedstick.”

I suppose my first “job” was working for my mom selling plants. I also did yardwork for an elderly woman who lived around the block for me, and mowed the lawn for my music teacher. Senior year in high school was when I had my first “official” job as part of the student janitorial staff. Every Friday from 3PM to 10PM a group of us would assist the janitors, with a break from 7-7:30 during which we got pizza from a place called Mama Theresa's. The worst duty to pull was definitely scraping gum from lockers which I thankfully only pulled once. Somehow I managed to always get the task of cleaning windows, which I found the easiest out of the other possible choices, mopping and vacuuming. Armed with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Windex, I would start from the third floor and work my way through the whole school, cleaning every glass surface in the school. I only ran into the rest of the staff occasionally outside of our dinner break, and had some of my best times of peaceful contemplation and serious thinking without distraction.

My High School was an all-boys Catholic school run by Marianist brothers, basically no-nonsense monks in black suits who in hindsight looked suspiciously like something out of The Matrix. I had spent most of my high school career staying out of trouble, and had never received a demerit, been out sick, or had detention. I didn't usually have to worry about running into a Brother while I worked either, as they usually remained in their residence on the other side of campus unless an event was going on, like hosting a dance with one of our sister schools.

One evening, one such dance was being held. I had snuck a peek in the gymnasium at some of the cute visiting girls when I cleaned those windows, and had noted the presence of brothers as chaperones. So when I ran into some of the other members of my crew playing a makeshift game of hockey with brooms and a rolled up ball of masking tape in a section on the other end of school, I thought it safe to take a break from my duties, hop up on the nearest row of six-foot tall lockers, and watch the game.

We all froze when the brother appeared, and my heart caught in my throat as I feared both my academic and money-making career had come to an end...

To Be Continued....