!2018Nov09 My work situation is in a state of flux, with my current
employer going out of business by the end of the year. I need to
either find a job that pays well enough to stay here or else accept
that my wife and I will have to relocate once again - something
we've already done four times since 2011.
The cost of living here in the greater Seattle area is ridiculous
and my background (quality systems management for manufacturing,
mostly large castings and forgings) isn't well-represented here.
I'm open to working in other industries but I haven't found
anything yet and I've been looking for months now. More than one
place I've talked to had a much lower salary in mind. Meanwhile
recruiters are contacting me about jobs in places like Michigan,
Arizona, or the deep South, places we have no real interest in
living.
I have somehow leveraged a bachelor of fine arts degree with
concentrations in printmaking (relief, intaglio, lithography) and
photography into a career in quality assurance for manufacturing
companies. It began with doing 'document control' for a steel
foundry and learning by doing from there. Training as an internal
auditor, becoming a process engineer for molding castings, filling
in for a 'temporary' lack of a degreed metallurgist, teaching
myself FMEA and the ins and outs of ISO 9001 and other quality
system standards.
I have been involved in the rigging and pouring of 20+ ton steel
castings and the manufacture of fireams, parts that go into space
and parts that go into mining and railroad equipment. If you had
told me where I would be in twenty years when I graduated college I
would have thought you were stark raving mad. And yet here I am.
Right now though I just need a new job...
And so requesting asylum at circumlunar.space is a good distraction
from the chaos that is my life in general. Good on Solderpunk for
offering asylum to the 'sundogs'. There is a lot of potential in
good old-fashioned text-based networked information and the world
may need some escapes from the corporatized internet if we don't
figure out how to restore net neutrality for commercial internet
access. We may have to figure out how to hide in the cracks and
crevices. Gopher and NNTP may be our new best friends.
This space may well ramble on about photography, politics,
computers, printmaking, books, quality systems, and gods know what
else.
