Working in the Coal Mine

And by 'coal' I mean mutual funds, and by 'mine' I mean bland, anonymous, North Toronto suburb. So far, it seems okay, but being there makes me feel like I'm trapped in an episode of the office (only without the funny bits). They seem like nice people –a tad disorganised though as far as my training goes, but a nice group. My first day I arrived and did some human resources paperwork stuff, then the human resources lady took me to the department supervisor who showed me around, introduced me to some people and said "So you'll be doing your training with M, but unfortunately she's in a meeting until 11, sooo... d'you have a book?" –They're encouraging office time-wastage before I've even started –awesome! When I started the training with M, she said "the training will take about two or three weeks..." and I'm thinking 'uh, shouldn't you know how long the training is going to take?' It made me think back to my birth-by-fire Nova training (although at least they had a plan about what was happening on what day). There was a lot of detail and 'well-you-won't-really-come-across-that-very-often' situations before there was any kind of overview of, oh, I dunno, what this company does, or what my job is maybe.

But I digress. A job is a job, and heaven knows I’ve certainly had much worse ones. The people are nice, it doesn’t seem to office-politicky, the work isn’t stressful, so this is certainly fine for now. I think I’m in need of some stability right to help with my readjustment to “The Real World.”

However, speaking of the real world, I’m constantly thinking about what I want to do with my life, and I think I may have actually hit nail on the head and made a decisive realization; I want to work in the travel industry — travel agent, tour guide, tour planning, that kind of thing. If there’s one thing I’m passionate about it’s travel! Defiantely my skills, languages and expatriate experiences are well matched for this kind of job and would be put to good use instead of being amusing stories to tell by the water cooler.

Now I had always been hesitant to consider the travel industry because you don’t make that much money; stuck in the mindset that you need to make lots of money to be able to travel. But being back in the corporate world where people make the cash money, I’m reminded that you also only get two weeks vacation a year! What I really need is a way to turn that equation on its head, and I think having a job where your job is to travel is just the solution I’ve been looking for. I’m actually pretty excited about is because I’ve never really had a strong sense of what kind of direction I wanted to take with my life.

So, now all I need is a job. Any offers?