Outed

I have a dirty little secret… I like to work. It's something that few people really understand but give me a good, solid job to do and then let me at it and I'm as happy as some people will be at a football match or a music festival. It doesn't really matter what the work is, so long as it has a solid outcome and I'm allowed to really get into it. Perhaps it's some disorder I have but I just can't help it.

I imagine this statement may seem somewhat inconsistent with my professional history since I have been jobless for the bulk of my 'career'. If you look a little closer however, these two facts are not so irreconcilable. In fact, it's because I like to work that I can't bring myself to stay in a job, especially one in IT, for more than a few months at a time.

Let me explain. You see, I'm pretty good at IT and because I'm an expensive contractor I usually get put onto a job when the shit has not only hit the fan but has gotten into the air-conditioning as well. Generally middle-managers are eager not to be seen too close to a project as doomed as the ones I'm put on. That goes against every instinct that helped make them middle-management in the first place.

As a result I can usually bypass all those management 'best-practices' and politics and just get in there and do my job. For me, this is often a period of bliss, where reason reigns supreme and creativity flows freely. You can almost taste the productivity and progress. Don't get me wrong, it's still a strain and I still need a break at the end of it all. It leaves me exhausted but satisfied, in the same way that a tough match does for an athlete or a solid performance does for an actor.

After a short stint of this unhindered progress however, the project (not coincidentally) starts to go well. It's at this point that middle-management usually begin to hover like vultures looking for scraps. 'Process control' is reinstated. Meetings, paperwork and politics flourish. Money is wasted, time is annihilated and creativity is weeded out and destroyed. Activity, which is more readily measured than productivity, becomes the focus.

I'm left hamstrung. Every which way I turn I'm blocked from doing actual, real work. Frustration begins to build and then apathy settles in. It's at this point I bail and then end up on these little adventures that you're now reading about. You may have noticed that in all of them I end up working. You see, that's my release: a chance to do some real work. As well as that it's meaningful, worthwhile work that does some good. The best bit is they don't even pay me, they're not even expecting me to do anything useful, which usually means that I'm free to do things my way and I can work as hard as I like!

I am then, not at all disappointed that moments after my arrival at the Mareeba Wetlands I find myself with a mop in hand mopping bird shit off the huge deck of the visitor centre. I spend the rest of the day serving tea and coffee and washing dishes. It's a fair taste of things to come. Although primarily a nature reserve, the wetlands depend on tourist dollars to keep in operation. It's peak tourist season in Northern Australia at the moment and it's during these few months that the reserve makes enough money to cover itself for the rest of the year.

I'm the only volunteer when I arrive. The two wardens, Tim and Lisa who are more or less my age, live on site and we share the work between the three of us. I take to it with a gusto that leaves them a little stunned. As well as the cleaning there's also track maintenance (i.e. shovelling dirt into ditches) and land care (i.e. pulling out and poisoning weeds). I get into it all with no complaints. Each job is well defined and there's a clear, measurable end-point. At night I fall asleep exhausted and at dawn I awake fresh for a new, action filled day.

Of course, even for me, there is a limit to how much satisfaction I can get out of cleaning toilets. The work may be free and unhindered but the end result, tourism, is not as fulfilling as I would like it to be. There's no reason why I can't work hard and have that go to a good cause as well.

My efforts do not go unnoticed however, and by just the end of the first week I'm 'promoted' to Assistant Warden (with my own name badge!). The pay is exactly the same (i.e. nothing) but the role is slightly different. With my help on the tourism side of things, Tim and Lisa are now able to spend a little more time working on the real conservation work. There's a bunch of interesting projects that have been sitting on the shelf that are now getting started and a couple more volunteers are on their way.

I've not comitted to anything (anyone I've ever dated will tell you that's not going to happen) but I am going to stay around a little longer than my initial two weeks to see how things go. As Assistant Warden I now get my pick of what I want to work on. Best of all, they're still going to let me mop the floors in the morning.