Porter's World

Regular Jobs Suck

As some of you may know, I got myself in trouble with the officers of the law exactly one year ago, yeah, those guys. To make a long story short, I was with someone who mixed tin foil and “The Works” toilet bowl cleaner. We went to my downtown area around 1 AM (bars were really active, lots of people around) and he mixed a few in a couple soda bottles and tossed them. These are for the most part completely harmless, but make a very loud explosion sound. In the end, we got caught by the cops and got ourselves in far more trouble than should have been possible for such a small stunt. I received a $300 fine and had to go to court. My charges for court were a felony charge for hoax explosives, and two misdemeanors. I ended up getting court diversion because I’ve never been in trouble with the law and seemed like an intelligent guy; this got me 1 year of probation, 40 hours of community service, and I had to meet with the community rep board to show how I was sorry and give back to the community. Where am I going with this you may ask, here’s where.

Being on probation sucks, but that’s not exactly relevant to the flash industry. Doing 40 hours of community service sucks too, that however, can be relevant. I used to be an MMO gamer back a few years ago, until one day while working at Pizza Hut in Idaho for $6/hr, I had an epiphany. I knew from that moment alone that I did not want to work at normal jobs for the rest of my life. Yeah I wanted to go to college, get a great job and have a life, but I didn’t know what for. This particular day it became very clear to me that I wanted to be a game designer, and that I was going to start working my ass off from that moment on to make that a reality. As you may know, this is exactly what I did, and I do in fact make games today for a living. I may not be the best at it right now, but I’m definitely learning the industry and well on my way to getting up there. As everyone knows, all motivation has it’s limits, it eventually wears off and things start to slow down. For me, this has been the last few months. However, because my probation was coming to an end in two weeks, I was forced to complete my community service hours or face some huge penalties.

During this 40 hours of community service I worked at my local Salvation Army, a thrift store that accepts donations and sells them back to the community for an incredibly low price. This may not sound so bad, but 40 hours of this just isn’t my cup of tea, at all. I go insane not using my mind, I start to get very angry and just have a hard time keeping myself in high spirits. This is the exact feeling I had working that day when my epiphany arrived in Idaho. Working this 40 hour week of mindless work around a bunch of people who clearly aren’t going in the direction I want to sucked, but it also brought back my motivation. Just like before, I was enraged and filled with a desire to escape the system that surrounds us all. I vowed to myself to get out of normal jobs and continue to support myself through my own business as soon as my community service was done. Saying such things may not sound to powerful in text, but if you have any idea how much negative emotion fills my body when I’m working a crappy job and doing 8 hour days, for a low wage, you would understand how much I mean what I say.

So that’s how things are going for me at the moment. I’m back in the mood to get work done like never before, and that’s exactly what I plan on doing. If you’re like a large majority of programmers or stay at home workers out there, you probably lack motivation yourself. It may sound crazy at first, but I highly suggest that if you are, you go out and work a crappy job at McDonald’s or Burger King, or toss yourself into 40 hours of community service and do 8 hour days. Put yourself through the reality that you’ll face if you don’t step up your game, maybe then you’ll have the same motivation I’ve found. That aside, I’m officially done probation and will be a free man with a clean record as you read this; now all that’s left to do is crank out some games with my newly found motivation.