After work, I had a long overdue coffee with storyteller extordinaire, Kevin MacKenzie, who I first met in 2007 when I booked him as the summer entertainer for Southeast Regional Library when I was Branch Supervisor there. Then we’ve stayed in touch ever since – through both professional and personal connections (in fact, he works at the General Hospital so that’s where we met up and Shea was able to join us after she got off as well.)
Then, I went to hear Eden Robinson who I first met at a writing event when I worked for the Writers Guild of Alberta in Calgary in 2001. After the event, a variety of writers (and tag-alongs like me!) ended up at a nearby restaurant and I was fortunate to sit by Eden and enjoy her stories, her thoughts on being a writer and most importantly, the best and most frequent belly laugh I’ve ever heard (and which I got to hear as i was one of the first people at the event so got to swap funny stories about forty-page torture scenes, being goth, and babies being trained to pee on command like dogs!
Finally, no selfie but a young woman from the Indigo bookselling table came up and said “Are you Jason Hammond?” Turns out she also works at Sask Books which used to be the Saskatchewan Publishers Group and is in the same sort of “intern” role there that I started in as my first “real” job after undergrad.
I graduated high school in 1991 and convocated from undergrad in 1996 after completing the popular “do your four year degree in five years” option. That means people who started working right out of high school have been working for up to 35 years and people who did a four year degree that they finished in 1995/96 have been working 30 years.
More and more of my classmates who did one job since high school or university – teacher, federal government worker, military, etc. – are beginning to retire. That’s still quite a few years in my future as I spent 10 years in cultural non-profits in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Occasionally, I’ll wonder how life would’ve been different if I’d taken a more traditional career path – get a job, work your way up as far as you can, retire after 30 years.
But working in non-profits was such an amazing experience – we were an office of only three in Regina (plus occaional interns which, as mentioned, was how I first came to work there.) Then it was only me in the southern Calgary office of the WGA (main office was in Edmonton.)
That plus very low, mostly grant-funded budgets meant you were…everything. You were IT, you were Marketing, you were accounting, you were the grant writer, you were the real estate agent, you were the office adminstrator, you were the policy writer and the HR department. You were the graphic designer and you were the copy editor.
I was thinking of that the other day when my boss gave me a really over-the-top compliment. But then I realised what impressed him was that I had synetized a bunch of the skills I had learned in the non-profit world – from teaching yourself independently to being willing to experiment with things you’re not overly familiar with to a bit of graphic design and user interface design (oh, I was the webmaster for both orgs too if I didn’t mention that.)
Anyhow, the older I get, the more I look back and feel fortunate at how my life has played out.