10 jobs in 10 years- a revolving door career

1998-2008

In the last decade I feel like I have been bounced around like a tennis ball, trying to find a job that I at least like, if not love. A job that could become a career. Life is full of ups and downs but for someone like me, the downs begin to be the only thing you see and you come to expect and prepare for the next. Like a 10 ton shoe ready to drop, I wait for the next catastrophe in life to occur. I have learned, through therapy and hindsight that I make the decision most likely to fail, most of the time. Still haven't entirely figured out why but I am working on it.

My resume over the last ten years looks something like this:

Mar 1998-June 1999 Purolator Courier Customer Service Representative
Feb 1998-June 1999 Festival Cinemas Customer Service Representative

In 1998 I stopped working for Rogers Video which until that point had been my longest running continuous employment. I worked two jobs while working with my film student friends on independent films. My first short was completed in late '97 with plans for a independent feature to shoot in '98. In the end, we shot the opening sequence for the feature and a still-born trailer of sorts to try and secure financing to no avail. One of the choices I made at this time was to place my relationship before my career, cutting off a valuable contact who was also a friend because my girlfriend couldn't deal with her.

That was really dumb on my part.

June 1999-June 2000 Belair Direct Certified Insurance Advisor

I left Purolator at the urging of my girlfriend to try and get a real job. She was making good money in a legal office and I wasn't able to keep up my end. I trained, took the exam, and became licensed to sell Home and Auto insurance in Ontario. I am grateful for this for only one reason, I know understand the insurance industry from the inside out, and know exactly how claims work. Unlike most who are usually over-insured out of ignorance and fear I am able to make informed decisions, which helps my expenses.

I was terminated from this position because I wasn't selling enough policies. The company had exploded onto the scene a few years earlier and in a bid to raid market share they wrote policies for everyone who walked in the door. This lead to a situation where claims where outstripping revenue. While I had the distinction of writing policies that were extremely profitable I was unwilling to write a policy that I knew would be coming back in a week or a month with a claim or a cancellation. Unlike some of my star co-workers I was also unwilling to steal other staff's enumerated quotes or reuse my own to reduce my quote-sale ratio. They got vacations, I got fired.

June 2000-April 2004 Self-Employed as The Board Room

This led to a most excellent opportunity or so I thought. I went on EI and enrolled in the Canadian Business Development program for small business. I started my own company The Board Room, offering art solutions to film companies in and around Toronto. At the time Toronto was a thriving multi-billion a year film industry. Little did I know the ensuing four years would rip the Toronto film industry to shreds leaving behind a tattered shell and my business along with it.

1999-2000 was a banner year for the business-$4.5 billion spent on film and TV in Toronto. The two big tent pole movies shot in the city during that time were X-men & Driven, each film with an $80 million plus budget that absorbed almost all the production services available. It was the salad days.

In mid 2000 SAG Commerical actors went on strike. Even though this was an American strike, a great many commercials used in the US are shot in Canada. Without SAG talent as the main faces of the spots, and the Canadian union unable/unwilling to risk the ire of SAG, commercial shots dropped drastically. As a side effect, Hollywood studios started greenlighting features in a rush to have product in hand should the SAG feature actors join in the strike. It never happened but suddenly there was a glut of inventory at the studios-feature production slowed considerably.

Then the worst conceivable thing happened.

20001 9-11

September 11th left North America in fear for years to come. Suddenly Vancouver, a short plane hop from LA was much more attractive to the industry than a cross-continent flight to Toronto. An already struggling industry was dealt another blow beyond the emotional devastation of the attack on the World Trade Center.

2002 was the summer of SARS- Despite the relatively minuscule risk to the general population of Toronto and the minor percentage of people who contracted the disease much less the smaller percentage that died, SARS became the boogeyman of Toronto. Not only would it be a near death blow to the tourism industry for years to come, it laid the final straw on the back of the film industry, which collapsed to 10% of its pre-2000 levels.

By 2004, I had given up the ghost. My business was not viable and had never had a chance to succeed much less grow in a dwindling industry. My biggest credit was on the Ryan Reynolds film FOOLPROOF (which I very much enjoyed BTW)

After jumping ship in the summer of 2003 I spend a week in LA, half-heartedly looking for work. I came back to Canada and moved to Ottawa to live with my parents for a few months and get my head on straight. Along with my business I had lost a relationship of 5 years and had trouble moving on.

Nov 2003- Aug 2004 Best Buy Canada

In the fall I decided I needed to be back in TO and so I moved into a boarding house and took a temp job with Best Buy working nights over Christmas. This lead to further positions with the company until I finally changed stores to work in the camera department in Etobicoke. The ultra-american rah rah of the corporate identity never fit well with any of the staff I observed and I saw no opportunity to move forward. Approaching the EBgames store across the parking lot I asked for job, and quickly found one.


Aug 2004 – Dec 2005 Ebgames Manager


Running a video game was a blast and though I made some extraordinarily high profile boo boos the store was successful. At this time I met a new woman, my eventual fiancee. Together we decided I should try to transfer districts closer to her in the east end- this was another dumb mistake. I took on a new store opening in the middle of a Scarborough ghetto, replete with the highest security measures of any store in Canada. I was saddled with a new district manager whose nose was so brown her eyes watered and her hand-picked choice as my assistant. His job from what I could discern, was to snoop on me. He quickly decided I was an impediment to his upward mobility and set about driving me out of the company. Eventually I left as I knew the end was coming. Had I stayed in Etobicoke I might still be running one of the most successful stores in the country, in a job I like, with people I liked but crappy pay and benefits.

Dec 2005 to Jan 2008 Honeywell Limited

In Dec 2005 I started with Honeywell. For the past year the team I worked with disintegrated as the older staff were unable to perform their duties with the new software and complaints from sales reps and customers trickled down to our US corporate masters. For months I expected the department would be extinguished as the US side continued to outsource (to no success other than cost cutting) many of our positions. Finally, in Jan 2008, two weeks after Christmas and with no prior offical notice, the department was dissolved and absorbed into the US.

It was a slap in the face if only that we were given 5 days notice of when we would be leaving. Severnce packages were offered and taken. The incompetent older staff danced the aisles with glee as they had been counting the days until they retired, devoid of any sense of responsibility of our demise. During this time I had invested a great deal in the company, as Honeywell was the first and only company I had worked for that had invested in me. I felt personally betrayed and thrown away, devalued.

This list doesn't include the temp positions I took for a month or two, or the film jobs I worked in a variety of position during this time. I edited a feature one summer, while helping a friend as grip/set dec/efx consultant another. In the end I have had at least 10 jobs in the last 10 years and I find myself in my late 30's at a crossroads, unable to move forward and unable to move back. Film is long behind me but I ache for creative expression. The corporate world has chewed me up and spit me out twice and retail, well the very word gives me chills.

I find myself to be a man of many skills with no direction as I struggle to find new employment. Unlike a case of square peg in a round hole, I am sphere replete with pegs in my surface and nothing but tiny square holes around me.