pmsumner

day 1 - your current relationship; if single discuss how single life is.

I am and have been for ~7yrs (more?) now in a relationship with pipsytip. For the past 4yrs we have lived together, moving in with one another in a lovely house in Chester, and have now moved to an almost identical house in Wrexham - just not one on a main road any more :)

Life is generally good, she drives me mental occasionally and I'm sure I do the same. We both have similar tastes in many things and when we don't, neither of us mind doing our own thing.

As neither of us know many people locally we do spend a lot of time in "our own company". Going on what I know of our other friends, this seems to be fairly normal.

She's still waiting for me to ask her to marry her, I'm still waiting for her to ask me :-)

( 30 days, 30 posts )

day 2 - where you’d like to be in 10 years.

There are numerous aspects to this, mainly work (career) and physical location. Also relationship-wise, hobby-wise, family-wise and so on.

Work - I used to know, but now I don't. When I was working for T-Mobile I had a potential future career progression and due to the nature of the business it would have been inevitable I would have ended up in Hatfield.

Now I don't know. I'm working in a small company and career progression isn't going to happen. The industry I work in (CCTV) is small and very incestuous and I don't see a future for myself within it. I need a change.

Along with this goes location. I like it in this part of the world (this part of the world being the North-West (well, kinda) of England, or more technically I'm now in North Wales) and have no plans to leave it. I look occasionally at jobs that would involve moving to the South and I can't see enough advantages to make it worthwhile (I do see some advantages, but the disadvantages really are huge). I just wish that more of the people I knew lived nearby.

My current location makes finding a new job kinda tricky. If I was based in or near a big city (Manchester/Liverpool) there are LOADS of jobs I could probably blag my way in to. But Wrexham? If you want mechanical engineering jobs, plenty of those around. Picking & packing jobs? LOADS. Tech support, IT, anything vaguely IT-support related? Nope.

What do I want to do career-wise? My goal is to avoid people management as much as possible and keep towards the technical side of things whilst also avoiding direct customer support, and perhaps head towards product management. This provides a nice mix, in my mind at least, of a requirement to keep technical skills up-to-date, innovation and keeping an element of support/training but not necessarily direct customer support.

I keep applying for anything I find interesting. Unfortunately even though I see my skills as being highly transferable (a support job is a support job), employers have their pick of the crop and why bother training me in a specific system when someone already knows it.

Relationship-wise I should probably add that by then pipsytip and I should be married by then. What could change between us? Who knows eh?

Family-wise, no plans. My family are fairly distant in general and I have no direct wishes to change this. I would like to see my parents more but who can afford to do a 400 mile round-trip every few weeks? Or should I say, I can't.

Which leads inevitably on to - financially - I will be debt free. Except for good debt (e.g. a mortgage). I explain this fairly regularly to people, but when I stop paying ~£300/mo in debt repayments - excluding student debt which adds yet more on to this - I will be able to do so much more.

Hobby-wise, I would like to seriously get involved with some kind of open-source project that I believe in and could contribute to seriously. I look every now and then at volunteering for various things but whenever I get involved with anything like this it takes over my life. I know Warcraft is a poor example but I don't do things by half.

I could go on, but I don't think I should.

( The rest of this meme... )