NB: Skip ahead if you don’t want to read the beginning boring stuff, the main topic starts later. Also, I had to take a fuckload of swearing out of Gareth’s half of the conversation. Man, that guy has a filth mouth. What? I didn’t say anything.
>boringstuff
I’ve been busy for a couple of days, both working and not working and I’ve thought about blogging but haven’t really come round to it until just now.
I suppose I should start from the beginning. For the last few days I’ve been on site, performing site inspections to ensure the correct signs are in place, that the temporary works are in place and still adequate, monitoring the affects of the weather on the sites. There’s only been one day where I’ve done nothing and it was earlier this week when there was no one around to accompany to the sites. That day was still quite fun because I went on omegle – but that’s another story for another day.
Today, I went out on site to make some measurements of the length of the sites and how much area we will need to re-cover up with grass etc. (something to do with the local council who want to keep the area looking pretty, but whatever). I got back from site and updated my placement log and did a bit of my interim report, yada, yada. Boring stuff.
>/boringstuff
>maintext
I woke up from my nap to hear Gareth (renamed for privacy reasons), the project engineer, walking up from behind me as he was heading towards the kitchen for a brew.
“What do you know lad?”
Tired-eyed Chasian waking up from his nap. “Huh, what do you mean ‘What do I know?'”
“Well, you tell me – what do you know lad?”
“I suppose I don’t know anything so that’s why I’m on this placement, haha, to learn I guess.”
Gareth smiles and laughs while I’m still confused.
Couple of silent moments pass whilst he’s brewing his tea.
“So, erm, Gareth, you happy with your job as a site engineer?”
“Project engineer… and well… I’m a firm believer that you have to love what you do in order to be successful,” and after mistaking my sleep-induced look for a look of confusion, “Well, the problem is that ever since I was a kid, I’ve never known what I really want to do. Right through from working 11 years with the Royal Engineers, where I left after reaching the rank of Sergeant and up till now after working 6 years with <this company>.”
Now I’m starting to wake up and I realise this is something quite personal to Gareth.
“But for the last 6 years, you’ve always been a project engineer on site, right? Have you thought about moving to office?”
“Hah, hell no, I was studying to be an architect/engineer (sorry, Chasian’s memory is fuzzy) before joining the Royal Engineers and I found myself behind a drawing board for 8 hours a day and mind you, I was good at that stuff, all the calculations and everything but that’s not my thing and being on site is much easier.
“That’s the question though, isn’t it? If money didn’t matter, what would you wanna be doing? When I left the army, I thought about doing something with seadiving because I had the training and everything, and it would have been nice to own a vessel and a few boats where you can let other seadivers on board and charge them for the facility to do diving. That would have been ideal but now I’ve got a family and I need something that pays.
“<this company> is good if you’re single- no, I’m serious. If you were single, you could easily move to this country or that country because remember <this company> is a market leader and it operates globally. But when you’ve got a family, you can’t settle down somewhere because contracts only last for a couple of years at maximum so there’s no point moving to another country if you’re gonna use work as an excuse to move.
“Nah, I wouldn’t be able to do that. If money didn’t matter, then what would I do… good question indeed… what would I do…”
Gareth looks down at his laptop and looks to have been lost away in the ocean of his thoughts…
>/maintext
Initially, I didn’t know what to take from what I was being told due to my heavy eyelids. Gareth is a cool guy; he might have a bit of a temper, he may dislike the company for his own personal reasons, and he may the biggest complainer I’ve ever seen (I’m terrible at making people look good) but he’s done nothing wrong and when you have a one to one chat with him, you get to see a whole other side.
Eventually when I got out of my zombie mode, I realised what was being said. Gareth may strongly think that you have to truly love what you’re doing in order to be successful but I think he meant something other than success – something to do with being content with your current situation and I have no doubts that Gareth, whilst not unhappy, isn’t feeling quite so fulfilled with his current routine.
I think it boils down one thing really, as clearly demonstrated by Gareth’s own story – you either do what’s right or you do what makes you happy.
Thank god I still have time on my hands to figure all this out.
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