Life has a way of kicking you in the balls, or in my case, punching you in the ovaries. A lot of you know that in addition to writing about my passion for motorcycling, I work full time as an Interactive Designer. I design websites, online advertising, email campaigns and that sort of stuff.
I’ve worked for some big agencies on big accounts. Last year I moved to a smaller agency with clients that were more fun and allowed me to be more creative with my design work. The downside to that is that I’d been working stupid hours with unreasonable deadlines and overall not too happy about it. Other than the ridiculous workloads of late, there were other things at play. Office politics were beginning to play a big part, tension with the offline creative group, pressure from upper management and then my boss was maneuvered into resigning by her new boss, etc. etc.
So it didn’t come as too much of a shock when I walked into a meeting the other day with my writing partner and we were informed that our positions were “eliminated”. I was laid off.
The sucky thing is that I was let go for purely political reasons, not economic ones, not because of poor job performance (in fact I got a more than glowing review just the week before and some of the coolest work of my career is slated to go live very soon). It’s been a long time since I haven’t had a full time job. I’ve been working steadily since I was 16 years old and today starts the first week that I won’t have to go somewhere to work. I can roll out of bed, have coffee with the cat and get my online portfolio together.
Luckily, if you can call it lucky, I had expected it. I had a lot of hypothetical conversations with my husband the week before, made many jokes about the possibility of not having a job the following week.
And so, here I am with a clean slate, at the crossroads, [insert cliché metaphor here]. I think I’d like to get some freelancing going and make a go of it through the summer. And I can also put a lot of focus on riding and blogging. Rippin-Kitten.com is going to be celebrating the two year blogoversary mark next month!
Now I have the opportunity to give more time and attention to this site. It’s time to retire this blog theme and incorporate a more robust layout. My readership has steadily increased over the past year and Rippin-Kitten is now one of the top three motorcycle blogs out there. I’ve been getting more and more followers on Twitter (thx fellow Tweeps!) and I really want to expand it to incorporate all the things people are looking for to take it to the next level. Don’t be surprised if you see some poll action (not pole action, sorry guys!) in the next few weeks so that I can get a better idea of who’s reading. I’m really excited!
Well, that is what’s happening in my world. How are you guys?