I Quit My Job

It has been quite a while since I last wrote anything here. But this refrain has been rather clichéd of late.

After nearly 14 years of association with I²R, I have finally resigned, and am serving out my month of notice of termination with them till the beginning of June.

It is a bittersweet moment. Much of my early adult working life was spent with the Institute, and the people I met there were smart and very technology oriented, the kind of things that I was very interested in (I still am). But things have progressed to the point where it was no longer tenable to be working there. My bond being done at least eighteen months ago meant that if there was ever a good time to leave, it was now.

I leave behind whatever is left of a team that I had spent a productive six or so years with. I made new friends among peers who were much closer to my age group than the last few times I was at the Institute. We bonded over an increasingly difficult environment that did not seem like it was going to get better any time soon.

I am not intending to write all that I want to say about the whole situation here---if you can meet me in meat space and want to talk about it, I would be happy to discuss it with you. Probably. HR already had a stab at it with me, and I gave the poor HR representative a whole bag of stories that will likely to be filed away under the ``delinquent employee---do not bother'' pile.

The main purpose of this post is to mark another milestone in my life.

Some of the people who know about this have asked the same question: ``Where are you headed next?'' My answer to them is a single ``nowhere''. I think I need a little break from it all so as to rethink and recalibrate my perspectives, especially since I am no longer contract bound to continue working or pay a hefty penalty. Part of the time off is to seriously think about where I am heading, ``career''-wise. In this time and age of pervasive slicing and dicing as practised by HR management, the ``career'' as a coherent track of work skill/ability development is no longer in vogue; the coherence is deconstructed to work with what is effectively a so-called gig-based economy where individuals whore out their individual abilities for paltry pay as companies claim yet another successful way of saving training costs while still maintaining their base line.

I have a few side projects that need completing. Despite talking about it potentially being done more than a year and a half ago, this time I am actually much closer to completion, prose-wise with respect to content. What is left is the sourcing and creating of necessary diagrams, illustrations, and photographs to fill in the existing placeholders. I have a concert coming up with my Chinese orchestra in November, and will need to practise a little more on refining my solo. I also have new impetus to improve upon my concert flute playing skills, and have a couple of pieces that I need to finally complete the writing of.

Oh, and I need to finally sort out my belongings in preparation for the inevitable move to a new place once we have figured out where and what exactly we are going to live in.

And I think that is roughly it for this update. Till the next time I suppose.