Amnesia Lane: Going from 1 to 400 in 10.07 years

Welcome to my 400th post on Damage Control!

I was on schedule to line it up with the 10th Anniversary of my first post, but computer trouble killed my momentum right as I was coming in for a landing.

I let September 12 come and go unfete’d mostly because I didn’t want to do two special features in less than a month. I did have a second idea on deck for a special stream, but can’t exactly stream when your SATA ports are on strike).

We’ll come back around to the stream idea sometime later. But with No. 400 hitting on a Tuesday and me getting out of work so late in the day, I figure let’s do the idea that involves actual blogging.

On a side note… do people still use the word “blog” ?

The seeds of this were planted back on my post for the Damage Control Retrospective. There, I told a portion of my story, leaving out a lot of details (less generous people would say “irrelevant parts” instead).

This isn’t about doxing myself or telling you all about my father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate. It’s about answering the dangling questions from that 10th Anniversary post and my official bio.

The Chronicle of Journaling

While my journalism degree was broadcast track (the program was called Mass Communication at the time), I spent my entire (non-game) journalism (actual, paid) career in print.

My first paid gig was as a designer and reviewer for my college’s newspaper. Perhaps the most noteworthy part of the entire experience is that I contributed spite comics for $3 a pop. This started in 2005, so I probably wasn’t the first person ever paid for sprite comics, but I might have been the first to do so for traditional publication. There may be some dubious legality afoot here, so I’ve already said too much.

It took some time after graduation to find work in my field, what with the previously mentioned recession being especially bad news for the rural state I lived in. When doing the math writing this, I was surprised to discover I spent not much more than a year in-between journalism gigs. It seemed like it had been two or three in my memory. But in truth, I graduated in 2007 (thus, no longer eligible to work the school newspaper) and returned to the funny papers before 2008 was out.

It was a rather unglamours job, though. I was to be the entire editorial division of a monthly community newspaper. It had a couple (literally) of contributors, but I mostly spent each month desperately trying to cobble the rag together out of news releases and what few events I could afford to go to. I made $600 a month for my efforts, which was about as much as I had been making at my part-time retail gig up until then. Working in my field was a worthwhile tradeoff to me, but it still made for a very tight gas budget.

The budget threatened to be tighter still one year later; my guaranteed two years of student loan forbearance would be up, and I had no realistic way of dropping $350+ a month on them. The new Obama administration rolled out some changes to student loan servicing that would help, but as I had already graduated, I was not eligible.

So I needed help on the student loan front, and I was ready to throw in the towel on journalism. The answer to both problems seemed to be going back to school. I would be a current student instead of a former one, and could put my existing loans back into forbearance indefinitely until I was out again. And after I was out, I could take advantage of the new loan programs to consolidate my old loans at lower rates, base the payment plan on my income, and have the remaining balance forgiven after 25 years of payments. Plus, I could get a science degree.

Pursuant to that plan, I had the galaxy-brain idea to flip the education script and have my second degree be an Associates rather than a Master’s. It was massively cheaper and easier, and it just made sense to me to rebuild my education from the bottom-up if I wanted to make a career change. I enrolled in the local community college’s computer science program. They offered an Associate of Science and an Associate of Applied Science. I couldn’t figure out which would work out better for me, so I took the three extra classes that didn’t overlap between the two programs and became the community college’s first dual-degree student.

The punchline to all that education buildup was that later that month, I was hired by the state’s third-largest daily newspaper.

It was a part-time gig but it paid $10 an hour, effectively doubling was I was making. I made the very, very foolish decision to try working both newspapers AND taking a full schedule of classes that fall. I gave the old newspaper the boot for spring semester and never looked back. It probably failed without me, as I don’t believe the owner (who was also the entire sales staff) found another sucker employee.

The pay wasn’t enough for me to become financially independent, but it got my head above water and kept it there. I kept up until I finished my re-education two years later, collecting some industry certifications along the way. It was at this point I was finally ready to make the jump to a new career. So naturally, the second-largest newspaper in the state offers me a full-time job.

Looking back at the retrospective and my bio, there’s an implication that I’m working in journalism even as we speak. I mean, I imagine you’re shouting at the computer screen every time you read what I write, so it’s like I’m having a conversation with you.

While Maine’s major newspapers passed me around like a dirty metaphor, I decided to actually made that career change at the end of 2015. While my situation had improved remarkably since my $600 a month days, I had reached the end of the line for pushing my career to my financial goal of owning a home. There would be no raise for me unless somebody died and I got their job — though the more likely scenario was the vacant position would go unfilled and everybody else would get to work more for the same pay. Which had already happened. Repeatedly.

And no, this is not the part where I instead get a job with first-biggest newspaper in the state. Aside from a single on-the-scenes report I wrote during inauguration week in 2016 (I got to play at being a Washington Insider for a day), I haven’t worked for Big Journalism since.

I managed actually doing the career change by first taking up some tech and data consulting, and then straight up leaving the state. I moved south, to Maryland for a higher education administration job in D.C. The pay was higher, but so was the cost of living. There would be no house in that situation, either.

After careful consideration of where I would need to go to accomplish my goal, I ended up taking a job with another school in the Midwest. And 50 weeks ago, I accomplished my lifelong dream of being house poor.

But this whole story leaves open another possibility about my work with Damage Control. On the 10th anniversary, I wrote about how it connected me to the career I never had. But now, when I take things more seriously, it can also connect me to the career I did have, but left behind.

And now you know the rest of the story.