For the first time since the end of March of this year, I will wake up on a Monday as an unemployed bum. Being unemployed can stress people out but I’m feeling quite relaxed about the whole thing. It’s a good time for me to rest up, relax, and have time to do whatever I want. I have the luxury of waiting until the new year to figure out where I’ll be working next.
There will be, of course, changes to my lifestyle that will be quite obvious from day one. Working a game studio, especially near the end of a project, involves a daily whirlwind of bug fixing, design decisions, lots of e-mails, asking questions, answering questions, and generally taking care of business. All of this happening around 100 or so people at the same time. I’ll go from that hectic pace to something much less frenetic. On Monday, it’ll be just me and whatever I choose to do that day. My first free day might consist of me looking up apple pie recipes online. That could be my entire day and that would be ok.
The gaining of all this freedom obviously comes with some tradeoffs. It doesn’t take a Roberto Einstein to figure out I won’t have any money coming in any more but there are also not so obvious effects. The first is the amount of free food I ate at Radical. I probably ate breakfast at Radical five days a week for the last eight months or so. There were also many a lunch that I had free because of Radical as well. Near the end, I also ate dinner there because of OT. If you count up all the free eats I had while working, that was a lot of money I saved. Now I go back to having to buy all my own food.
I expect my electricity bill to go up going forward as well. When I spent eight plus hours at work, my home sat empty that entire time. That meant my lights were off and all my appliances were off or on stand-by. Now I’ll be home most of the day; that means lights and other stuff on for most of that time. My computer will be on more and so will my Xbox 360. It’ll be interesting to see how much more juice I use compared to last month.
The biggest adjustment, which could be viewed as a good or bad thing, is the amount of free time I’ll have to buy things. This isn’t really a surprise to me anymore. Anytime that I’ve transitioned from working hard to having copious amounts of free time, I’ve always started to spend more than usual. Idle hands usually lead to online shopping. I’m also susceptible to buying stuff just because I now have the time to interact with anything I buy, like new gadgets, kitchen appliances, and kittens.
Well, it’s almost 2:30am and there some other chore I need to get to. When its noon on Monday, think of me because I’ll probably be still asleep and warm in my bed.