Life a Ceiling Tile Salesman
I like making stuff. Anything really. Cooking, building, writing music, writing, drawing. I just like to create. I like sharing what I create. But at some point I stopped and prioritized everything else. Some of those priorities were important, wife and kids and getting ahead, but it frustrated me. I got jealous of friends still making projects and I always felt like I had nothing to offer so I buried myself in my job. If I couldn't create like I did before I would take the freedom at work to create projects and improve systems. My outlet became how product was organized and how to improve processes. None of which I could stand back from and say "that's sick. I made that."
My job is stupid. It's a good company with good people but what I do is very low on the construction and creating totem pole. An architect designs a building. Some other guys say "pfft, I'll knock that shit out for under a million." They then ask me to price it. I say "that will be 1 million and 1 dollars." Then they inform me of everyone offering it cheaper, why I don't know what I'm talking about, how I've insulted their livelihood and how I have to help them out. So I say "$999,998" at which point we can be pretend friends again until the next time I get the silly idea of profit in my head. It's sales and purchasing. It's project management. If it wasn't ceiling tiles it'd be windows or doors or any other mess of over engineered nonsense to fulfill the aesthetic absolutely necessary for a middle school or pharmaceutical company. The irony of the price being too high for a ceiling at a pharmaceutical company, ya know, because pharmaceutical pricing. I am a cog in a very large system of handshakes and begging for lower prices.
But I work with good people dealing with the same nonsense and I work for good people who have taken care of me. There are worse things I could be doing but the industry is still flawed.
For 5 years I've seen myself as a ceilings project manager. I learned the ropes, I know the systems, I can tell you details about the ceiling in your waiting room you don't care to know. I can order material you didn't know you needed so it's ready when you do and I can bullshit my way through a late truck. I've shaken hands with absolute scumbags, assisted companies I know don't pay their bills, made friends with old carpenters who have stronger outlooks on life than the best self help books, and I even took golf lessons. Golf blows. I really tried but for fucks sake let's close a deal over skee ball in some air conditioning with no mosquitos. Golf is dumb.
I tried to immerse myself in this industry. I hoped to be the old guy known by everyone like a local celebrity. I played along with people I didn't care for in hopes of making a good name for myself. I did this to the point of anxiety attacks about letting someone down because I couldn't have their material in time, or not catching mistakes they made and delaying a job, or not calling someone back quick enough and losing their trust. A job I enjoyed became a sentence of trying to please every person I talked to regardless of how absurd their requests were. I apologized and took blame for things so far out of my control I couldn't even consider solutions.
I spent three months in a constant state of panic because of my job. I was going home and fixating on it. I was losing focus everywhere and completely engulfed in "what if I did it wrong." It was hell. So I started writing stories as a distraction and I remembered how much I like to make stuff and tell stories. I remembered that I never cared about ceilings or construction and this was always it. I kept writing and even posting some of it. It was clear that creating things is actually me and not this job. I'm not a ceilings project manager outside of work hours. I'm a dad and a husband and a kid who likes to make stuff. It's simple and perfect. I'll sell some of my time to a company and do the work so I can keep living, but after that it's back home to wrestle kids and dogs and make something new every day. I keep writing, I doodle, I strum a guitar, I do some home renovations.
Ceiling tiles can wait.