Happy, Healthy, Wise, Wealthy

I heard the little snippet of verse many times growing up. Dad would recite it from time to time as a way of conveying his priorities in life, in order of importance: happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy. I don't know if he came up with it himself, but he seemed rather pleased to hear me repeat it when I quoted what "a wise man" had once said to me.

I was explaining why I had decided to quit a full-time job with a nice benefit package, for a not-quite-full-time job without... and at a slightly lower hourly rate.

Financially, it's a bad move. I'm not exactly making good money now, certainly not what someone with my qualifications should be worth. This means I'll be getting even less. So much for "wealthy". I'll have to pay for my own health insurancem which could jeopardize the "healthy" part. And my only retirement fund will be whatever I can afford to save myself and put into an IRA, which isn't an especially "wise" plan for the future compared to an employer-funded 401(k).

But first there's "happy". I have not been happy at my job. Sure, after 10 months unemployed I was delighted to get it. But my orientation and training period was more like a scavenger hunt for all the things I needed to do my job, as they didn't provide me with a working computer with the software I needed, policies-and-procedures documents that had been updated in the past two years, keys to the office, or even a phone on my desk. Frustration turned to boredom as I figured out who my coworkers were and which to ask for help with what... and the tediousness of my job set in. When I wasn't running around dealing with crises, I was bored out of my skull. And then there was the complaint from a user that I was rude to her, in which she misinterpretted what I was saying and misreported the rest. It was her word against mine, and he wrote me up as if every word of hers was confirmed by God. I've gotten to know and like a few of my colleagues, but not him.

So when I got the offer to go work for the college where I've been a student (and coincidentally just graduated), where I have several friends and acquaintances among the faculty and staff, in a position which would give me greater responsibility and more interesting work, and get another 8 hours a week free... it was pretty obvious where I had the better chance at "happy".

It might not work out. I'm probably going to need to do a far amount of freelance/consuting work on the side to make the finances feasible. There's no guarantee that I'll actually like it. But it'll actually give me the spare time I'd need to cultivate that kind of creative freelance work, and the contacts (via faculty, staff, and graduating students) to get actual technical consulting work. And just maybe this time I'll get a boss where the mutual-respect thing actually happens, and I'll get some satisfaction from the work I'll be doing.