Are friends/family shocked at your salary?

Not necessarily true. Please cite concrete examples.
There are many people in professions in this country working hard, kicking ass and not getting "rewarded."

 

Big boy .. I envy you. 2 1/2 acres and another 26 elsewhere (god, please by a hunting camp!)... You, sir, are living the (my) dream.


Tell your mother-in-law Orville from SportsJournalists.com told her to have a nice steamin' hot cup of STFU.

 

Attorneys, for one. Me, for another. I have a friend who works in marketing for a Fortune 500 company. She's been working 55-60+ hour weeks for years.

 

truck drivers are paid by the mile, not the hour. and still have deadlines. you really think all of those log books they have to keep on hours are 100 percent 'correct'?

 

Well, I was lucky enough to have a couple friends that work at the warehouse, including one who's pretty much the head manager there. I actually started that job while I was still working at my old newspaper, just once a week to make some extra cash.

Then when I got laid off, I picked up some more hours.

I learned how to operate a forklift when I worked at a home improvement store right out of college while I was still applying for newspaper jobs. But I'm not an expert or anything. The lift trucks at the warehouse I currently work at are totally different. They're all stand-up lift trucks, so I just had to learn to use them on the job. I thought I needed to get some sort of certification, but I never did.

I think if warehouses are busy enough and need the help, they'll hire you and train you on the job. It doesn't reallly take a genius to learn how to operate a forklift or various other lift trucks. It just takes a little hands-on experience, and you're good to go.

 

I would tell her to shut her fucking face. If my future MIL ever bitches about my career choices (unless it was like pornography or something), I'd tell her to shut the hell up. It's none of her goddamn business. That's bullshit, man.

Besides, I think your living arrangement is way fucking cooler than your in-laws. I'd much rather live on a modest home on 2 1/2 acres and own another 26 acres of property in the county than live in a gigantic home in the city or in some endless suburbia fuckhole.

I'm jealous of you. I'm all about the smaller house, bigger property someday. I love my space. Fuck, maybe I should be a farmer or rancher. At any rate, right now I'm lucky to have a two-bedroom apartment.

 

pretty much anybody on salary.
Restaurant managers for instance. When I worked as a restaurant manager I worked 55-60 hours a week.
My dad is in the coal business, as a salaried company man, it was nothing for him to work 6 days a weekm, 10 to 12 hours a day.

 

I was driving by a house with a horse pen the other day and grew quite jealous. My best friend rents a house on a dairy farm and it's awesome. His kids are both under five, and they love to go over to the fence and see the cows. It's the life. On the Fourth of July, we can shoot off fireworks and everything else.

I'll probably end up in a "suburbia fuckhole," unfortunately, but damn if there isn't something to farming or ranching, huh? Maybe when I retire someday. I think there's something innate in us that draws us to it, especially in this day and age.

 

No doubt, Waylon. I get the same feeling. I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'll wind up in a "suburbia fuckhole" myself. I know I used a pretty harsh phrase with that, but I suppose living in a nice home in a nice neighborhood isn't all bad.

It's just that, like you said, something in this day and age draws me to open spaces. And it's almost like you read my mind with the Fourth of July thing. That's almost always what I think about when I think about living on a farm. Fourth of July, grilling out, drinking beer, and blowing off mass amounts of fireworks with family and friends with nobody to bother me. God, do I sound like a hick, or what? Oh, well.

I've often thought about how great it would be to live a quiet life in like Wyoming or Montana as a rancher. Hard work, I know, but you're outside and you work for yourself and it's quiet and there's no idiot managers who only got their jobs because they knew someone telling you what to do. And at the end of a long day, you go down to the watering hole for a few pints or settle in your easy chair and watch a ballgame.

Of course, my romantic view on ranching could be totally wrong, and I don't know the first goddamn thing about it, but, strangely as I get older, I get more drawn to open spaces and being outdoors. Maybe all those years crammed in a cubicle in front of a computer in a noisy newsroom has made me feel this way.

 

Not sure if a "surburbia fuckhole" is worse than living in podunkville, where about the only thing open after 8 p.m. is the 24-hour grocer. While there are many things I don't miss about the city, it does have it's advantages.

 

The thing that's keeping me from smacking the MIL is that I'm in her will, so I tolerate her blabbering as much as possible - but she does get on my nerves when she goes on her comparison rant. The father-in-law, on the other hand, is the calmest person I know. I've heard him raise his voice in anger only once in 27 years, and that was at some stupid-assed ski boat driver who crossed in front of FIL's boat when he was taking off.

The 2 1/2 acres we live on is in a subdivision in a town of about 2,000 residents. It's 17 miles from my house to the paper; my wife works a few blocks over at the medical center. Because of our conflicting schedules, riding together to work is out of the question.

My wife is the only reason I'm in the country. Had I not met her, I'd probably be living and working in some metropolian area. The last thing my wife wants to do is live in the city. She wants her wide open spaces to ride horses. We have three horses on the 26 acres, which is 20 miles from our house, and a colt on a smaller pasture behind our hosue. I don't ride the jackasses, but my wife and daughter do.

 

That's about where I am at and I think deep down if a lot of you are honest you are too. My career doesn't define me like I thought it did when I was 23 and got my first sports writing gig (at a 18,000 daily in a shit-hole town) - it is just a means to pay the bills and feed the family.

I'd like to have a career when newspapers finally die -- but my goal more than anything else right now is find something I am qualified to do that will pay the bills until I figure out what is next.

Bartending is something I do once a week already -- and if I had to do it three or four more nights and then fill in with a couple of days waiting tables or something else in order to pay the bills, my pride wouldn't suffer a bit and I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think I will eventually go the teaching route, I am very close to a certificate but frankly I think a part of me would die if I had to show up at the same place at 7:30 a.m. every day and stay there until 3:30.