Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Time for more change...

On the last day of the tax year (the 5th April) I'm going to be shutting up shop on my career as a self-employed computer geek. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I found it hard to not spent my every spare moment worrying about money and income (the primary obsession of the average contractor), which kind of sucks when you're trying to get on with the rest of life. Secondly, the end of the tax year's a good opportunity for doing so as it means everything's nice and tidy for going back into the fully-employed PAYE universe, so now is as good a time as any to return to full-time work. Thirdly, we're planning on buying a house early next year, and it's very much easier to persuade people to lend you money if you're in full-time employment. Finally, while I've been lucky to have enough work to pay the bills and then some the kind of short-term consulting work I was hoping to pick up hasn't materialised.

Once I decided to go back to being full-time, I was extremely lucky as I've been able to take my time and look around for work which interests me rather than just taking the first job I could find out of necessity. The result of this is that from late April I'm going to be working at Google's newly-expanded London office, which is building a systems admin group. This makes me happy, partially because it's going to be nice to have a stable workplace again but also because there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there which I'm looking forward to being part of. It's likely that I'll be spending quite a bit of time in Dublin initially, and I'm also looking forward to revisiting some of my old stamping grounds. Of course, some things have changed - now I want to go and run around Howth Head on a warm spring evening rather than just walking around it.

I'm feeling fairly upbeat as a result of all this. The notion of having spare time which I feel is actually my own rather than the business's is extremely liberating, and I've got all sorts of plans on the go as a result. One of the main things in my mind is my long-dormant Geek Aid project, which deserves some attention. It seems that all of a sudden I've stopped spending all my time thinking about just making enough money to live and have gone back to wanting to change the world, a laughably naive and childish notion which life still hasn't quite managed to stamp out of me permanently, although that's fine by me.

Finally, I now have a couple of weeks of rest before starting at Google and a strong desire to not just spend it playing games. I shall have to think of a project to keep me occupied.

So, things are all pretty upbeat at the moment. I feel as if my life just took a major turn for the better, and it's time to get on with living it.