I don't have a cool life-or-death story.
I didn't almost die from a snowboarding accident.
I wasn't diagnosed as a toddler with an illness that was supposed to kill me.
I was a working mom with a good job. The money was good, the benefits were great, and the people were smart and nice.
I had a cute little private office and the company was doing interesting work. I had created my own department, and everything we did was based on something I had built. (For a control freak like me, this is a very pleasant.)
And I was about ready to shoot myself from boredom.
A normal person would doubtless have been able to navigate this. There are a lot of things in the world that are worse than boredom.
But I am not a normal person
For me, being bored is like being slowly boiled alive. It seems tolerable at first, but every day it gets more and more painful.
The obvious answer would have been to change jobs, but I had a strong sense that working for someone new wasn't going to cut it.
First because we were sailing into the worst recession in decades, and companies weren't lining up to hire anyone. The few who were hiring seemed to like specialists with neat, sensible resumes, not Janes-of-All-Trades like I was.
(It turns out I was a classic Linchpin, but Seth hadn't written that book yet so I didn't have a word for it.)
The second, more important reason was that I knew it would be more of the same.
In the best-case scenario, I'd work lots of hours away from my family (my beautiful little boy was just two) to build something cool, get it to work, tweak it until I thought it was just right, and then … start to die inside again every time I pulled into the downtown garage and made my way to another office.
Maybe I could try for the executive suite? That would have brought interesting new challenges.
Sadly, I lack the right instincts to climb...
