Ah, my slightly late annual look at how things are changing or not on the job front has arrived. It’s the ninth (9th!) such post in this series, and my mind is boggled by how many there have been. How quickly does time fly.
Anyway, I guess things are slowly shifting as I move toward what I hope will be a fulfilling career as I bound along through middle age. Things are basically unchanged in the plant, as we call the manufacturing facility where I am employed. I’m still in Omni Glow, the name for the light sticks we package, as I have been since September of 2013. Ten sticks to a box, sling it onto the conveyor belt, grab the next handful, stuff, slide, and on and on and on. As with each year before I am faster than ever, because the rhythm when really established makes the day go by in a blink. I basically aim to stay awake, do the highest quality job possible, and head home at 3:20. I’m always amazed when I manage to catch faulty sticks even as they race through my fingers quickly enough to leave the occasional papercut. The past two weeks have been the best in months, because we’ve finally obtained enough product to really get going without being stuck and sent back to rework or worse, the pointless counting of buckles into already worn plastic bags as a time-killer.
Even as I work the “day job,” I am aspiring for more. As I’ve often discussed since it started, one of the main ways I’m planning to do this is through tutoring other blind individuals on assistive technology. I’ve now had three students at the plant, and with each I’ve gotten a little better. The last finally got me to open up more, and by the end I was talking to him before sessions started and after they ended. As others have told me, this not only makes the student more comfortable, it also puts me at ease and allows me to not stress as much about everything going perfectly with a lesson. After all, it’s about connecting with the other and finding out what a given student truly needs.
It’s been a couple months since I had my last student, so in that time I’ve been working to sharpen up. I did a couple of mock sessions with other tutors, which took me back to the days of grad school in the University of North Carolina’s then-named Rehab Counseling and Psychology Master’s program where we did these sorts of sessions for video tape. They do help though, as they show me how tight I had previously been and how smoothly I can teach if I let myself.
And even more recently, I’m being tutored by my cousin. He’s taking the online assistive technology program at World Services for the Blind, and thus has mastered many of the techniques involved in the delicate work of helping others. We’re working specifically on using Jaws for Windows with Outlook, but I think a lot of what I’m learning can be applied more broadly as I come to understand pacing, proper use of lesson and guides, and the like. I’m also grabbing a lot of material from the Freedom Scientific Training page so that I might use it in conjunction with these newly acquired techniques to actually help whomever I am assigned to next. Truthfully, working with him is instilling discipline as well, as I’m having to come home from work and shift gears twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays at 6 PM. This is a real challenge sometimes!
And that’s this year’s Job Days update. Things are getting really interesting around these quarters, and I hope to have even more exciting news to report to you soon.
Tag Archives: job days
Job Days No. 8: Hire Yourself
I find myself almost exactly 17 years since my job-finding journey began, with a vast majority of those having been spent working for agencies that primarily employ blind and low vision people. If not for my transition period just prior to marriage, I would have reached eight years with LCI, hence this being my 8th Job Days post. And I think I’ve had an epiphany: the truth for me is if I want some other kind of career, I must hire myself.
What do I mean by this? Well, first I had to do an extensive interview with myself, helped by my coach of a wife as noted in my Finding My Passion post. Then, I had to figure out what my, as she says, “Glows” are, those areas I’m already good at and can use to propel me toward that next stage. Finally, I needed to ascertain at least some of my many “Grows,” the areas on which I must work if I want to improve whatever opportunities I am able to find.
And I’m sort of doing that. I’ve upped my book review platforms to two now, having done one book so far on NetGalley that I will probably port over here someday so that I can then link the two and maybe some big publisher will come to view my humble blog.
But probably the bigger thing I’ve done is to actually kick off the podcast to which I referred in the previous entry. That’s right, the first episode is live! It’s an introduction episode, and it took me hours to get all of the pieces lined up just so. Will it pass the true audiophile’s test? No, but I don’t have the fancy audio equipment required for that just yet, so tear me apart softly, please. Ha, ha. What I do have is an idea, and I think this idea just might take me somewhere. So it’s still worth doing, even with the stuff I currently own. I also have booked my first guest, so if I can get everything together the next episode will go up on April 5..
As for the actual job stuff, what I usually write about in these updates, it’s mostly the same old same. Still doing light sticks, or I guess as it is more appropriately called, Omni Glow. My own slightly overconfident evaluation is that I’m now stronger and faster than ever with my work. Or I’ve at least come up with my most effective strategies for making it through the day ever. The supervisor, and pretty much everyone else, says I’m still too quiet though, but a lot of that is related to my subpar hearing. This issue has not been made any easier with everyone now wearing sound-muffling masks. And speaking of, we’re finally starting to get back to full speed after COVID, and I could not be more thankful for that. Lots of boring days had been spent twiddling my thumb or doing some form of “re-work,” where we remove already-packaged items so that they can either be correctly packaged or disposed of. It kept the bills paid, but…
So yes, I think this is the first year I find myself, not just hoping that some magical opportunity would land in my lap, but really starting to lay down the foundation to make my own show. I think that’s an important lesson not just for me, but for so many of us with disabilities, especially if, like me, you’re and paper resume is kind of lacking. As I have stressed in the last few of these posts, sadly our perceived job abilities are still far too constrained: rehab counseling, assistive tech work, or government work. These positions are great and have led to rewarding careers for many, but I just think that those of us who wish to need to start pushing our own boundaries to make more for ourselves and for those who are coming up behind us. Hopefully I am a positive influence to others, as I certainly aim to be.