On the Margin

To quote Paul Newman, “sometimes nothin’ can be a pretty cool hand….” I feel that way about my place in the margin.

Yukon River, near Ruby Alaska, circa September 1986

I suspect (because I’ve had many such conversations, usually on tired Friday afternoons), that many IT professionals like myself secretly pine to do something else. I don’t think it’s heresy to say that, either: it’s just honest. So as I further diversify my career, moving in the direction of novelist, I thought I’d share my personal journey in that direction. My hope is that you enjoy such diversions and can take solace in them, even if you’re not ready to make such a change yourself.

The funny thing is, I’ve been moving this direction my whole life, even if I didn’t quite know it. Early in my career in AT&T and then Bell Labs, I always took assignments that seemed “one off”, because the usual grind didn’t suit my temperament very well. I joined a mainframe development group in AT&T, but honestly wasn’t very good at it. When the chance arose to be their “PC guy” (this was back in the early 90s), I jumped at it. Then I was their LAN guy. These diversions were good and suited both sides, but it still wasn’t enough. When I got the chance to jump into Bell Labs, I took it, and that was good too, for a while. Still, writing database applications could only take me so far. And when the chance arose to move from New Jersey to California and become a Bell Labs liaison to Intel, I jumped at that, too.

I won’t describe all the steps, mostly because that would be boring, but I found I was moving further from the trunk of the tree, out into the limbs of less conventional employment. After another five years, I left the tree all together, and did a startup, then became a consultant. I still do consulting (now as an independent), but after leaving the fold and going on my own, I discovered something else: I was always solving someone else’s problems. Though it was usually interesting to do these projects, I’ve had a nagging sense that I was growing too old for that, and should start pursuing my own ambitions, and that they weren’t IT related.

There are many reasons to take pause before abandoning an old career, principally logistics concerning how to support oneself, and I remained stuck on that issue. It was only when the nagging sense became more urgent (i.e., if not now, when?) that I realized I didn’t have to abandon anything, and could do them at the same time. I’m sure most reading this would say “no kidding”, but for me that has always been difficult. I needed focus and quiet for my particular vocation (writing), so blending the two has been difficult. I’ll go into this more in later editions of Watercooler Ruminations, so let me get back to my thread this week, which is the margin itself.

As I’ve noted in a couple previous posts, I recently published a novel named McGhee in the Gloaming. (Amazon). I want to be upfront here, too: I’d like to get the word out about my book, but I’m worried about spamming. There’s nothing worse than unsolicited messages selling product. But it turns out there’s some synergy here – the first chapter of the novel is entitled On the Margin and describes a character who is struggling to find his place. Only after I wrote it did I realize this applies to me as well, and largely describes my career trajectory. For me, writing is an act of constant discovery (I don’t write from outlines). The chapter depicts a young man leaving Alaska following a summer after graduation from college, and the same man 40 years later who has gone back to see it again. The odd thing is that I’m rather doing the same thing: I wanted to write at 22, and it has taken me 30 years to finally rediscover that.

The margin has always provided a perspective for me that I found valuable. As a telephony systems architect and IT management consultant, having a view from the edge allowed me to see things others couldn’t who were mired in the middle of the fray. Sometimes I marvel (now that I’ve seen it) that I found a career so suited to my talents and disposition. But what I want to say to you is this: if you’re like me and suspect you don’t really fit in, that can be a pretty cool thing after all. And there are others like you, watching from the edges and maybe even calculating their own change of course. That’s what I’m doing, and it feels pretty good to be finally on the way.

So if you’d like to know what that means for me, or for my protagonist McGhee, you can check out the book site (bobhazy.wix.com/mitg), read the blogs on the chapters. Maybe you’ll be inclined to read the book yourself. I’ve heard it’s pretty good. The chapter backstories are neat, and it makes for a different kind of reading experience than you’re used to. And the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s all one big thing anyway. It is my life, now. Fictional character or real, we’re all looking for a path that makes us feel actualized, and sometimes, that’s from a place on the margin.