Can has career?

It's a bit like buses, really. The majority of the decade that's passed since I did my Leaving Cert. if you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I'd have shrugged, or said "maybe a teacher?" or "maybe a dialect coach?" and then would have drifted on not doing anything to further either of those goal-ish things.

And then over the last year I've come to realise that there's this career I might actually like and be good at. I could... write stuff! Not terrifying, having-to-find-a-publisher writing. Just the type of writing that we all see in work every day. How-to guides. E-mail templates. FAQs. The sort of thing that I always notice when it's done badly.

But meanwhile, in my "just-for-now" crappy call centre job that had, three years later, become a pinball-bounce from department to department which was better than taking calls (anything is better than taking calls) and was punctuated by occasionally being told I was awesome. Being told I was awesome sometimes was nice in a company where there's been a pay-freeze even on promotion for the last two and a half or three years.

So there I was in the Evil Telecom, getting seriously seriously bored at my "temporary" gig in the scheduling department despite some lovely colleagues. Every day I rang people and asked if they were available for their connection to be installed the next day, following the same script and hearing and making the same jokes. ("And are you renting the house or do you own it?" "I own it. Well, the bank owns it!" "Ah well, we all own the banks now!") So off to Google I'd go to window-shop for a future; houses, nice apartments, jobs, holidays, other cities I could move to.

I'd been talking to my good friend JK for a while. He is a high-up and awesome consultant-type in the area of technical communicaton, and he kept telling me I was awesome and I could totally do a tech author job, and I should apply for one. So I eventually sorted out my CV (there's a whole nother drama there) and it was sitting on my computer, awaiting tweaking as it was in an imperfect state.

And the three combined; the boredom, the Googling "technical author Dublin" and the CV sitting there, ripe for the sending out, and I said "feck it!" and I sent it off on Friday. On Monday I heard from the company: they wanted me to come in for an interview. Later that day I heard that I was being asked for back in our call centre: they wanted me to come and join tech support.

It turned out, in a comedy of timing, that I began in tech support this Monday, had a second interview and was told I had got the job, and handed in my notice first thing on Tuesday.

So... why am I suddenly sought after now? This happened to me with relationships too. Years of hopeless crushes and the odd snog and then suddenly there I was with people I fancied fancying me back left right and centre and, a bit like the "sure I might as well" job application, I effortlessly ended up with something that was just what I wanted for the rest of my life.

I can, I suppose, track it back to a gain in confidence by me. Said gain leads me to attempt to pursue my goals rather than drift along in the current. But it's almost frightening how, once I begin to stretch out my hand towards the goal, it tumbles into my palm without further effort on my part. I'm missing out here on valuable failure.