If I had to pick a slogan for 2010 after the fact it would have to be, “Nothing Is Going According To Plan.” A month into last year, things at my work (which anyone who followed my Twitter stream during that time knew was a constant source of stress to me) got so bad that I went from being merely bitter and pissed off every day to so stressed out I came pretty close to puking in the trashcan at desk every morning. If I had to paraphrase the why of it all, it would go something like this: towards the end of January our client company said to me, “Look dude, we know you have like thirty extra job responsibilities that weren’t in your job description when we hired you, and we aren’t paying you any extra for any of it, but it turns out we’re going to be audited by a government agency later this year on a bunch of stuff dating back to mid ’08 so can you just make everything good for that so we can pass it?”
And I replied something along the lines of, “To do that I would have to send you back in time to visit your 2008 self to deliver the explicit message that you should listen to the issues I’m raising every week in our security and compliance meetings and do something other that stubbornly harumphing and crossing your arms. We weren’t compliant at all last year and the changes we’ve implemented since then probably wont’ hold up to close scrutiny, which, again: it’s because you’re stubborn.” Again, I’m paraphrasing.
So then they were all, “So we can’t get what we need to present to the auditing agency?” and I was all, “You know very well that we weren’t compliant and didn’t have a formal record keeping system for everything that we would need back then,” and then they were all, “Okay, look dude, we can’t come out and explicitly ask you to do this in any sort of formal way, so can you take what we do have and ake-may it-ay ook-lay ike-lay e-way ere-way ompliant-cay uring-day at-thay ear-yay?” and when they persisted in trying to force me to fudge things so they could stay out of trouble, I eventually said, “Well, good luck with that,” and handed in my notice. So I quit my job at the beginning of 2010. It was ridiculously scary. And this is the part where most people say, “but it all worked out okay,” but it didn’t. I didn’t have a plan. I had some good ideas, but coming up with a plan once your canoe has already gone over the edge of the waterfall doesn’t do you a lot of good. I ended up being without any source of income for six months, burned through most of my savings, dire financial straits, blah blah blah, and now I’ve devoted several more paragraphs to this topic than I had intended, because as the title implies 2010 had its share of good times, starting off with Sarah moving here at the beginning of the year so that she was only a commuter train ride away instead of a two-hour flight distant, and without her being so supportive and so rad all year and can honestly say I don’t know what I would have done this last year but I imagine I would be even more of a mess. I got to see some of my far flung imaginary friends again, and I’m grateful for that whenever that happens. I got to pay visits to San Francisco, and Seattle, and cities all along the Oregon coast, and Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia and we all know any year that features anything Canadian can be all that bad. One of my best friends got married. I made a whirlwind trip to Montana, which nearly resulted in me dying but you know, whatever. I did some other stuff too but I imagine everyone is pretty bored at this point so I’ll just shut up now and give all y’alls the year in pictures.