Last week, I finally followed through on the largest single life decision since my marriage: I quit my job.
For the last 9 years I’ve worked in varying capacities at Nintendo of America, a place I somehow simultaneously loved with all of my heart and hated to the core of my soul. There was never any middle ground with me and Nintendo – it was never just “meh” to me.
The job came to me at a time in my life when I really had no idea where I was headed or where I even wanted to be headed. In 1998 I had received a degree in Computer Animation which I promptly forgot about when I scored an internship-turned-job at Wizards of the Coast. This was a huge coup for me at age 20, since I was (am, have always been) a humongous geek and loved almost everything Wizards made.
Over my four years at WotC, I went from an internship in their fledgling (and ultimately defunct) Digital Media department to answering rules questions for befuddled Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons players to ultimately running their internal games library, playtesting M:TG sets, and doing any number of catch-all tasks within their R&D department. I loved my time at Wizards and, even to this day, can say that it was the best job (or set of jobs) I’ve ever had. Which is why it made me not just ignore, but practically erase from my memory my time in college and the degree that it generated.
When I was laid off from WotC at age 24, I was devastated. I had semi-consciously decided, in my early twenties, to shift the focus of my life away from the degree that had burned me out on animating while dumping me into an animation world that had a glut of unemployed talent and onto a burgeoning career at a company that I (mostly) loved and made products that I could really get behind. Even Pokemon. This was the third round of layoffs WotC had ever engaged in so, while more frequent than perhaps necessary, the WotC layoff routine had not yet become a joke worthy of immortalizing in Dork Tower.
For the next year I was basically unemployed. I got a small paycheck doing ultimately mediocre freelance layout work on a controversial D20 RPG supplement called The Book of Erotic Fantasy, did a few other very minor freelance jobs, and collected state unemployment. When that ran out, I did a few boring temp jobs at small companies and Microsoft. Blech.
At this point in my life I was completely directionless. I was lucky enough to have a wife with a steady income (she also worked at WotC and had managed to survive the layoffs) so we weren’t out on the street, but that year of unemployment was rougher on both of us than we could’ve thought. So, after the last stint as a temp at the big M, I took up my friend’s offer to join up with the big N.
As it turned out, getting help to get into Nintendo wasn’t entirely necessary. Their testing department did – and still does – generally have a waiting list of several hundred eager gaming newbs, all waiting in the wings of one of Nintendo’s several temp agencies for the standard ramp-up to test the holiday game releases. I got in fairly easily, found that I had an aptitude for breaking shit, and I was off to the races.
At first, my intention was to use this as a stop-gap solution until I figured “things” out. I’m sure, at some point in everyone’s life, we’ve worked a job that was “just for the income until I get my acting/writing/drawing/prostitution/meth-ring off the ground”, and that’s all Nintendo was. The problem was that I lacked the motivation to figure out exactly what the fuck I was supposed to be doing at home when I wasn’t working. In all honesty, it was just nice to have steady income again, right up until the point WotC laid off my wife.
Well, shit.
For the next year, it was my wife’s turn to float. She had temp jobs here and there, worked for a startup for a while but didn’t really jive with whatever vision they had, and eventually landed at Amazon. For a while we were both technically temps, but we were steady temps. When she got hired full-time, I did a little dance of joy. My brain, however, had switched gears from “let’s get this creative shit going” to “how can I get hired and thus increase our income?”. My path at Nintendo was unintentionally set.
Four years. I spent four years as a temp at Nintendo, well longer than any human being should live in self-imposed pseudo-stability. Every 10 months I’d be forced to take a three-month break due to Washington’s temp hiring laws, and I’d squander the time off by screwing around rather than putting my efforts toward anything creative or useful. Then, I’d go back to Nintendo and settle right back into the routine.
In 2005, the worst possible thing for my creative juices happened: I got a job that was WAY worse than temping at Nintendo. During one of my mandatory breaks, my temp agency placed me into a customer service position at Cingular, who had only just acquired AT&T Wireless. I spent five full weeks in training and was (luckily) placed in their business services division, doing tech support for Cingular’s corporate account billing software.
If it sounds terrible, that’s because it was. Not only was I supporting billing for large-scale corporate accounts, the things I was supporting didn’t work right. Simultaneous backend and software upgrades caused their systems to shit the bed, and I was receiving angry calls from corporate accounts who were reporting $75,000 discrepancies in their bills. (Yes, that’s a comma, and yes, that’s the right number of zeroes.) I woke up every morning dreading my job, and left work every evening pissed off and stressed out. I hung on long enough for them to offer me a full time position, and laughed in their faces when they offered me $7 an hour lower than industry standard, and only $1 an hour more than I was making testing games at Nintendo.
How, you may be asking, was this bad for my creative side? It showed me how bad things could be, and at the time my only barometer for comparison was game testing at Nintendo. So, I went back there, and started pouring my efforts into applying for permanent positions and increasing my income rather than using it as I had originally intended – throw away work while I did creative things on the side.
The next year was rough on my psyche. I had applied for and failed to get four different positions at Nintendo, and was at my wits end. I was on the verge of quitting in disgust when a friend in another department talked me into changing jobs, and I moved from doing debug testing (breaking games and reporting bugs) to Lotcheck testing (certification of finished games prior to pressing). This was either the best or worst thing that could have happened to me – I can’t quite tell which just yet; I’ll need another couple of years of hindsight – because it drove me forward and forced me to parlay that change into a full-time position in only 6 months. LEVELED THE FUCK UP. Now, my wife had a full time job at Amazon, I was a perm a Nintendo, we both had benefits, and we were making more money than we’d ever seen before. It took a good two years before the luster of that started flaking off.
See, the creative side of me was creeping back in. I had started designing a couple of games and randomly begun writing a book. I had started a new website and created a podcast (eventually I’d be hosting two), and it was re-introducing me to what it felt like to birth an idea into the world rather than simply execute on someone else’s. It made me start to question some of the bullshit I was putting up with at my job, and I began to see the greener grass. Unfortunately, my brain was still in need-income-or-world-implodes panic mode, so I couldn’t figure out a way to break free.
I decided that the best thing would be a change of scenery. Maybe that would refresh my senses and put me in a position to look at my work/life balance – which was severely fucked at this stage – with fresh eyes. I began applying for internal positions outside my department again. At the same time, my current work situation just kept getting worse. Between arguments with my boss, changes in my responsibilities (read: stripping me of responsibilities), and some of the dumbest departmental decision-making I’d seen at the company yet, I was reaching my last straw.
It was PAX 2010 where, yet again, the thing that happened was either the best or worst thing for me. On Saturday afternoon my wife and I were sitting down to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory across from the Seattle Convention Center. I had wandered the show floor all of Friday and part of Saturday. I had recorded a podcast Friday evening talking about all the cool things I’d seen, and I realized that I needed to start creating something. I had reached a point where I not only hated, but resented my job.
In a moment of the most amazing timing in my life – seriously, if I made this up I don’t think you’d believe me – I was in the midst of telling my wife that if I didn’t get the job I was applying for at Nintendo, I was going to just quit outright. Just as she was starting to respond, my phone rang, and they offered me the new position. The waves of relief with which I was overcome washed away most of my coherent thought about my creative efforts. Luckily, this time, they found something to hold onto.
Over the course of two and a half years at my new job, it carried an entirely different form of frustration with it. In my previous position, my frustrations were personal – low level decisions that were directly impacting my job and my work environment. I absolutely loved my new job – and continued to the entire time I was in it – but then watched the corporation around me make so many higher-level decisions that I felt were either ill-informed or downright stupid.
As a long-time hard core gamer, that was hard for me to watch. I’ve been a Nintendo fan since the early ’80’s, and have been playing their games most of my life. As a gamer, I love Nintendo franchises. Some of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had have been at the hands of Nintendo. So, seeing them make boneheaded decisions – and not necessarily the ones the public sees – actually hurt. Over my time there, I found it increasingly difficult to divorce my love of Nintendo as a gaming franchise from my job at the Nintendo corporate office, and that frustration started creeping back in.
This time, however, that little creative spark had grown to a flame, and my wife and I had been discussing me quitting for a while. This wasn’t specifically related to my job, at all – like I said, I really loved it – but we were finally at a point in our lives where we could absorb some of the risk involved. We didn’t have kids, we had bought a house and our payments were awesome, her job was getting better and her income was enough that we could afford to take the hit.
So I quit. And it’s turned out to be one of the best decisions of my entire life. After I put in notice (and I gave four weeks so as to screw my co-workers as little as possible), I felt… changed. I was expecting to be stressed and nervous, and to have to force myself to push through those feeling in order to get on with my goals. Instead, I had a perpetual stupid grin on my face, and I was walking around in practically a euphoric haze.
Rarely in my life have my decisions come with so little apprehension. This was one of the biggest decisions of my life, and it was accompanied by almost no doubt. Today, I figured out why: It’s the first time since being laid off from Wizards where any decision about my career was grounded in a decisive direction. The decision came with a plan, and a forward-thinking idea. So many of my career moves over the last 10 years have been based either on unexpected upheaval or the desire to exit my current situation rather than enter into a new one. I made this decision knowing full well that I loved my job and could continue to enjoy it, but that it wasn’t right for me.
So now, we’ll see where it leads. My wife has been unnaturally supportive, as have all of my friends. I know plenty of creative people who have been telling me for a while that when you make decisions based on your happiness, good things happen, but I haven’t really believed them until now. Of course, I only left my job on Friday, so I don’t really know if good things are coming or not.
But it sure as hell feels like they are.
