“My 3rd job.... I want a loft...”
That was the entire explanation attached to a photo I sent from my phone.
Beatport was the real job. The infrastructure had grown into hundreds of systems, global traffic, storage, networks, releases, and plenty of late nights. I was the director of IT, but I was still close to the machines and the incidents.
The second job was consulting for a small group with servers, firewalls, virtual machines, mail, and a colocation setup that needed to be rebuilt. It had started with an NDA and a limited block of hours. The hours grew because the list kept growing.
The third came from a Craigslist reply in January. They wanted somebody to maintain Linux and cPanel servers for five to ten hours a week. I wrote in the afternoon, had a conversation the next day, and got the work.
The schedules stacked on top of each other. A Beatport deployment could run twenty hours. The consulting firewall could go in that night. A monitoring process could need attention from an airplane. None of the systems cared which job had already used the day.
The loft was the simple part. I saw a space I liked and connected it directly to the extra work. I was not writing a five-year plan. I was looking at a picture and doing the math in the least scientific way possible.
Three jobs meant more money and more options. It also meant that nearly every open hour already belonged to somebody.
I sent the picture anyway.
“Some day we can have one yes?”