Allrighty! Gather 'round, pull up a chair, sit a spell...
This is the story of how Sage came to be where she is now...
My first real job after I came to college happened in Feburary of my Freshman year. I was dating this guy who worked at the lab at the hospital here in Asheville, and he recommended me to his boss and they liked me, so I got hired. I worked that job for three years, got to know all the ins and outs, and at the end of it was ready to tear my hair out. So, I quit the month before college graduation (April 2005), having enough money in the bank to not worry about being jobless for a while.
Graduation is over, May 2005, (and I now have an official degree in Multimedia and Design), and I'm thinking to myself how nice it would be to get another job- I was quite burnt out from my hospital job and from doing school, so a break was welcome, but I did want to find something fun to do. Thus I start looking at all the ads, everywhere, and come June I see an ad that the school's career center has sent out for a Jeweler's Apprentice. Being the creative type, and never really getting into jewelry before, I send my resume in having visions of Professional Jeweler's Studio and me being the trusty aprentice, learning the tricks of the trade and having a ball and such. Bob's your uncle, I get the "job." I use quotes here because the woman, although an amazing jeweler, lived on the top of a mountain in a shack (no lie- her and her husband were building their cabin in the interim) and was THE SINGLE MOST disorganized person I've ever met. I had to drive 20 miles each way to get to her place, and she wasn't going to pay me until I had learned enough about jewelry making to make pieces that were good enough to sell. I lasted until about August.
So I was out of a job again. What to do? I paid a visit to my alma matter's career center, and after much discussion and knowing how disorganized my jelwelry woman was, and how there were many similar artists that were the same way, I got the idea in my head to make my own buisness offering orginizational services to artists here in Asheville. I was inspired by the jewelry woman, because if she had had her act together she would have been a rival with Cartier, no lie. So I read all the "start your own buisness" books and met with the Community College's Small Buisness Center head dude, and was all gung ho about the idea for a month and a half... but I just didn't have the firey passion to actually go through with the idea. It was the kind of thing that would have been awesome for me to come up with, someone else to start up and do all the paperwork crap, and me to actually do the work.
So now it's like... October of 2005. I cool on the job idea for a few months, as I have plenty of money and it's not a huge issue. About January I start freaking out because I don't have a job and it's been like... almost a year since I had a job and OMG! So my every waking moment is consumed with getting a job- I apply to lots of things that sound neat, interview with some of them, get turned down by all of them, and basically feel really rotten because here I am all smart and with a degree and NO ONE WILL HIRE ME! I was sad. But, Martel (my husband) had started a new class at college and had a teacher who was really nice and was a chiropractor, and seeing as how I was in the market for a new chiropractor I paid him a visit and happened to mention that I was looking for a job. The next visit I paid him, he told me that he and his wife were looking for someone to help with their "special needs" child and would I be interested? SO, being very thrilled, I said of course I would be happy to, and landed my job as a home healthcare aide, taking care of my chiropractor's daugher on tuesdays and thursdays, and being on-call for whatever the rest of the week.
At first I was all excited about having this very humanitarian job and helping people and blahity blahity. I work with my chiropractor's daughter from March to May, at which point I was very unceremoniously and without warning told that the gal who helped on MWF was going to be working with them full time over the summer and they didn't need me anymore. The very same day they told me this, however, another client that I had worked with asked if I would like to be her full time worker, to which I happily said yes. This client lived out in the BOONIES in a trailer park and was starting to get just a wee bit demented. It was the most boring months of my life- I literally sat around reading books all day. So in the beginning of July I'm trying to figure out what in the hell I can do to get out of this stupid, insipid job, and at the same time Martel gets a new job as a computer technician at a shop here in town.
Martel's like.. fourth day on the job, this guy comes in who's friends with his boss, and on the way out the door happens to mention that he's looking for a good web designer, seeing as how he runs an ad agency and has websites that need to be built. Martel tells him about me, we meet up, and he likes my work and hires me to freelance for him.
SO that's the story of how I got to be doing freelance web design for an advertising agency, finally working in my major and trying to decide if I like it as much as I thought I would. It is definitely more enjoyable than any other job I've ever had, and my boss is very very fun to work for. Plus I can work in my underwear!
The bottom line is- it's never time to "settle" on something. You don't have to have one job for your whole life. Hitler was a housepainter, Harrison Ford was a construction worker, Bruce Willis was a bartender. Do what makes you happy while it makes you happy, and as soon as you get disgruntled, go do something else! A rolling stone gathers no moss!
