Advances in alternative energy technology over the last four decades have made it both easier and cheaper to live off-grid. This series provides a personal perspective on the pluses and minuses of living with technology in the forests of Northern California.
“Can I at least get my lunch from the fridge?”
“No. I’ll fetch it for you.”
My boss — from this point on, my ex-boss — left the HR office to liberate my lunchbox from the clutches of the corporate cooler. There was an uncomfortable moment of silence, after which the nice HR lady continued droning on in a carefully modulated neutral tone about another piece of seemingly-endless paperwork that follows a firing as inevitably as the seagulls that follow a fishing trawler.
I wasn’t really listening. I’d never been fired before. My feelings were not my own; concentration was impossible. I didn’t notice when my boss came back and smugly deposited my sad little lunchbox on the table in front of me.
The medical device company I’d started working for as a consultant in February 2010, 40 people shoehorned into a space meant for half that number, had an energy and excitement that was catching. I worked hard through first one, then the second, then a third contract. The offer of a permanent position a year later, with all the perks — healthcare, share options, retirement plan — was too good to refuse. But like the pot in which sits a frog slowly being boiled alive, the company around me had been changing — expanding its business operations, cutting back on R&D — and I hadn’t felt the temperature rising, until I had been cooked.
My transfer from R&D to the IT department brought with it a new boss. We didn’t get along. We had a number of heated and sarcastic exchanges and finally, enough was enough, and I was quietly escorted to HR that fateful May morning in 2012 and given my marching orders.
Being fired is not as cool as this.
I’d been increasingly prepared for it, like a seditious playwright in Soviet-era East Berlin, waiting tensely, week after week, for the harsh squeal of car brakes in the street in the small hours of the morning, footsteps on the stairs, the door opening at the kick of steel-toecapped boot. It’s almost a relief when it finally happens. You can finally stop lying to yourself and everyone else that everything is all right.
The last of the paper seagulls having been set to flight, I handed over my swipe card; the nice HR lady ordered me a cab. She gave me $200 in cash for the fare — an amount which I suspect would have taken me two counties away had I been in the mood — and I numbly put my coat on and left the building for the last time.
It was clear that staying in my overpriced Lower Pacific Heights apartment was impossible. I arranged a storage unit over by Mission Bay and moved all of my stuff out over the course of the next month. I’d had long and heartfelt discussions with my dad and stepmom. It was agreed that I could come and live up in Humboldt County indefinitely, and help my stepmom look after my dad, who was due to have an operation on his ankle that would prevent him from walking for four months.
In a stroke of timing that doesn’t happen to me often, a contact I’d made in the bioscience regulatory industry phoned me the day after I’d been fired. He had a telecommuting job for me, starting the following week.
It was that at the beginning of July 2012 that I found myself driving up Highway 101 in a car packed with a number of boxes of clothes and books, and various items of electronics — a printer, a 20-inch monitor, a Mac Mini, a rather crappy Windows laptop — ready to begin a new life and career in Southern Humboldt.
Brilliant and fun. Great picture of you too!