OR: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the Internet.

As I may have mentioned the other day, I have quit my job. There’s a lots of reasons really. Firstly, I didn’t like what I was doing. I fell into the job while desperate for cash after completing my Honours and it was never a good fit. Secondly, following the company being taken over by a much bigger player last year, it became a fairly tortuous place to work for anyone with a creative personality.

The things it though, I’m not writing this to further complain about the people I worked with, because really it has very little bearing on where I want to be.

When telling my Big Boss that I would be handing in my badge and gun he asked if I had a new job lined up, and whether I’d need a reference. I told him I’d let him know. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just that the skills this company thinks I have aren’t really the skills I want to showcase to future employers.

It’s like a specialist in the artificial insemination of Lemmings deciding to become a spy. It’s not that they aren’t actually probably quiet good at knocking up furry, suicidal* mammals, it’s just that MI6 doesn’t really care.

My skills that do translate – my communication skills mainly – are mostly self evident to the employers I’ve been speaking to about future roles. Which brings me to the title of this post.

As soon as I announced my resignation on Twitter, I received a message asking me, in so many words, where the sender would get their daily dose of schadenfreude from now that I was leaving my work. And the truth is, while I won’t be censoring my personality, you will have to look elsewhere.

It was Lachlan that got the job, worked in it for a couple of years, and yesterday quit, but it’s Warlach who will take up the next job I do. My comments about work, usually designed and twisted to be amusing rather than anything else, came from a situation where Warlach was separate from the person who worked for my employer. Twitter was my connection with likeminded people – people who don’t think the only browser is IE, who understand the internet and who enjoy pop culture.

In a situation where my online self is part and parcel of what I do – and let’s be honest, I’d have to be pretty stupid to be going for jobs in Social Media and Community Management and not think it had to be – my Twitter account will still be honest, but it won’t do anything that could damage those I work with, employ me or whom rely on my skills online.

This isn’t actually a major change – I have plenty of friends in social media, met both there and IRL, and I don’t post everything that crosses my mind when it could hurt or insult them. Keeping track of this, the acceptability of different spheres of communication and an understanding of voice is what I would like to think I’m pretty good at. Case in point is that there are plenty of things I do online I keep separate from the world of Lachlan or Warlach – I am someone who speaks their mind but discretion is the better part of valour.

So, what does this mean? Well, it means that if someone pisses me off on public transport, or I am annoyed by something in the media, it will most likely play out the same way. However, if a colleague at a new job annoys me? I’ll just talk to them about it rather than shout it to the Twitterverse.

Hence, Lachlan is dead and Warlach is now on duty fulltime.

I’m hoping that this change will lead to bigger and better things. Some of the roles I’ve spoken to people about sound amazing, and certainly in terms of job satisfaction everything is looking like it’s on the up and up. I just have to accept who I really am:

I am Warlach.

I am a Geek.

I am capable of doing the jobs I want to do.

Hell, I’m a Digital Phoenix arising from an animated Flame.GIF, baby.

And I’m very excited to see what the future holds.

*Yes, I know Lemmings arn’t actually suicidal. It’s more an expression than anything else, albeit one based on Walt Disney’s lies…