I Got What I Thought I Wanted. Now I’m The Dog Who Caught The Car

I’ve bitched a lot about my work, especially how there’s so much work to do and I’m getting so little money for it.

Well both of those things have been addressed now and my only thought is shit, what do I do now?.

Firstly, my job let me hire an IT assistant. In my time working I’ve had to wear many hats like help desk, sys admin, project manager, database administrator, customer support, programmer and even accountant! I don’t know what sort of tasks I can delegate to them, especially since they want to enter cybersecurity. I’m also shit at delegation itself.

I guess I’ll start by figuring out what the orientation itself should be. I should also use this as an opportunity to get knowledge out of my head.

The second thing is that they finally gave me more money and while I’m happy and very thankful, it’s dawning on me that this comes with so many responsibilities.

There’s work responsibilities. It’s pretty much a manager’s salary so I’m expected to actually take on the role and responsibilities of a manager. I can’t get away with being shit at my job anymore, I actually have to deliver. I’ve spent an entire month doing mind numbing boring shit that I wish I could abandon and yet I can’t since it’s my responsibility.

Personally, it’s even worse. I imagined doing a lot of shit before I earned more money. I’ll buy this, save that, repay her, take care of things, start doing this and so on. Now I have the money, I now have to reckon with what’s actually possible. Two pieces of advice I’d leave if you find yourself in this position.

1. Build good financial habits early. Money is a multiplier of who you are.
2. Be slow to raise your consumption. You don’t know if the pay increase will last so keep spending as you were before until you sense the increase is set in stone.

Writing this, while I’d like to say while I was smart with half the money, I practically lit the other half of the money on fire.

Making things worse is that there’s a whole lot of responsibility at home I need to take up. I was living with my mom since I came back from college and I let the past 5 years coast on by, relying on my mom to do all the hard shit. Not just groceries and getting Internet, but also managing this huge fucking house she insisted on building.

Well, she decided to cut her losses and retire to start a PhD program in Morocco. With that is a lot of responsibilities I need to take over now. I don’t pay rent and there’s help at home, but there’s a lot of shit to manage. Random shit breaking in the house, dealing with various construction contractors, taking care of the animals at home, hounding tenants for rent—it’s a lot!

She had warned me multiple times that I’d have to learn this shit but I shrugged it off. Well, better learn to talk to those driveway wankers who refuse to work until you pay them for shit they didn’t care to quote in the first place!

That’s nothing to say of the social responsibilities she had as well. Serving in church for one. Also letting people bitch to you, taking care of other family members, attend various functions and all that. Last year my mom called me while she was on holiday telling me a family member got critically ill. He’s ok and I spent half the day bouncing around pharmacies, clinics and imaging—I expect that I’ll have to do this more in the future.

What now? I guess I have to man up and face this shit head on. Last year I finally got around to learning SQL and PHP after being forced to do it due to work. I was very much not ready to do any of that stuff but I bumbled through it and now I have a dangerous amount of confidence at the sort of stuff I can do. I guess the same goes for all these responsibilities I have to take on.