Becoming a Butcher

As those of you subscribed to my Youtube channel already know, I’ve quit High Tech and have landed a job as a butcher at a local small butcher shop with a really fantastic reputation for high quality food at regular supermarket prices. In some ways this is one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made, while at the same time as you’ll see by reading on, it is one of the most difficult. After 5 years of university and 15 years working as a programmer and a Network Administrator, I hope this means I’m done. My wife and I certainly are resolved to make it work as difficult as it will be financially, because I really have not liked High Tech for some time now.

I’ll never forget the day I lost my job at Nortel, after just over 12 years working there. But let’s first back up a few months to when they declared bankruptcy. I’ll never forget that day either - hardly anyone actually worked on that day - most of us stood around in the hallways in small groups huddled together chatting and speculating. I recall this day so clearly because I was casually bouncing around from group to group, to hear what people were talking about. And in doing so I was being extremely flippant about it all, making a lot of jokes and taking it all pretty lightly. It was not until one woman broke down into tears (not because of anything I’d said, fortunately) that I finally realised that most folks were pretty worried about it all. It was then that I started to hold my tongue. In hindsight it was foreshadowing the day I’d get cut, because on that day I drove to work knowing I was getting cut, and as I approached the building I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom take hold of me. Not just a superficial sense of freedom, but a deep-seated, become-one-with-the-universe sense of freedom as though nothing could ever possibly touch me or harm me. When the building finally came into sight I was actually cheering alone in my car, and screaming with delight. Even though I knew I would not get a red cent from them because of their bankruptcy protection. (Aside - my friend with 12 years experience who had gotten cut just before the bankruptcy got about $60,000 - nice!)

It was at this time that my wife and I first talked a great deal about getting me out of high tech. We discussed in detail what our options might be - options that were significantly more limited by the fact that I did not get a red cent in severance. It would have been too easy to sit back and take some retraining, with a huge chunk of money to rest on. Or maybe start up a small home-based business. And so what ended up happening is that we got scared and I ended up jumping on the first thing that came along. What we did not realise at the time, was that even though our options were significantly more limited without that big severance, we still had lots of options if only we opened our minds to them. This was something I felt deep within me as those waves of freedom splashed over me that day when I was getting cut, but somehow a fear managed to creep back in that took control. So after a short 2 months of unemployment, I jumped back into another high tech job at the same salary with similar benefits to those I had a Nortel. But in all honesty, in the very first week I was there I knew that it was the wrong place for me to be, and not just because it became evident that there were tonnes of skeletons hiding in the closet of this small company of just 25 people. Skeletons which would eventually help lead to my undoing there.

Let’s Talk Money

So, just how different will my income be as a butcher? Significantly different. Before I worked at Nortel I was working at Acadia University with a salary as I recall of exactly $30,000 per year. When I started at Nortel on the first day of 1997, I jumped into a position at exactly $50,000 per year, and during the next 3 or 4 years I got raises which took me up to about $75,000. Those were the good years at Nortel, when the sky was the limit and the world was our oyster. They were throwing money around like drunken sailors in a whorehouse, and I stood to personally benefit quite significantly from it. Things slowed down of course after that, and so by the time I lost my job I was sitting at about $82,000. But when you add bonus and pager pay, there were some even juicier years in there. I peaked around 2003 or 2004 with $105,000! Wow! I look at that now and wonder where it all went. OK, we managed to put some into an RRSP (401k) retirement fund, but aside from there there was not much left in the way of savings. As a bit of an aside let me tell you a little story about these huge sums of money that people in high tech make - the whole time I worked at Nortel I was well known in my group for telling everyone that we were all very seriously overpaid. I said it frequently, that I and everyone else was overpaid, and I still believe it today. There is nothing to justify it. And while people earning that kind of money are not in the habit of discussing their salaries with each other, I very much got the impression that I was on the low end of the scale (except for people with only a few years experience). I did the math a few days ago and if memory serves me correctly, if you assume 3 weeks not working for vacation, and 40 hours a week, that works out to about $40/hr.

As a butcher’s apprentice I’m getting $13 / hr for the first 3 months, and after that I’ll get a raise according to how well I’m able to do the job. How much of a raise I really do not know, but let’s face it - I’m more of a liability there at the moment than an asset. Our master butcher has to take time to train and supervise me, so in fact I’m slowing him down and not really producing much in return. This is why when I sat down in the office to discuss income with the boss, I told him I completely agreed with him that I should be paying him. Their master butcher is not only a world class butcher, but as I am finding out he is a world class teacher, and I feel both honoured and privileged to receive his teaching on a 1 to 1 basis like this. In fact I am treating it pretty much like my martial arts training as far as that goes. I keep telling him to give me the shit jobs - and slowly he is doing that. I should be earning the privilege of his teaching.

How the hell can we do this?

Yes, that is indeed the question.

First of all, this time around, we stayed on unemployment for 6 months. I probably would have preferred to stay there longer to see how we could live like that, but the opportunity arose for this job, and I needed to jump on it. But still, 6 months was long enough to know that we could get by, if only just. And to all you taxpayers out there - yes I was applying for jobs the whole time. Lots of them both within high tech and elsewhere. Dozens of jobs in that time frame, and I even had a few interviews but (thank goodness) nothing panned out. This time around we even had the option of staying on EI for a really long time, since our newest born son was born just before I got cut from my job after Nortel. So I was able to take EI parental leave at first, which lasts for about 8 months, and when that was done my regular EI would kick in. I could have stayed on the dole for about 18 months total if my memory serves me correctly. But in that 6 month period we figured out that we could actually live off my wife’s small part-time income, plus EI. We were just barely scraping by of course, but we were doing it. So we knew that any position I got which paid more than EI, was going to put us into a better position. As memory serves, EI worked out to be about $11 / hr. So by the time my 3 months are up, I should be 40% to 50% more than EI. Gravy train!

The 80’s song “Saved By Zero” comes to mind - when you are at rock bottom there is no further down you can go, and nowhere to go but up.

Something that helps us a great deal is that we are by nature frugal people who generally recognize the difference between “wants” and “needs”, and who have very few wants. Really, all I want is food, shelter, and a loving family. Done. We live in a small house - tiny by most peoples standards at only 1000 sq ft - with a responsible mortgage that was well below our theoretical ability to pay in that high paying job. We have only 1 car and would like very much to get rid of even it. We do not have a lot of the toys and gadgets, whirlygigs and gizmos that so many people seem to want. We don’t have cell phones nor cable TV (nor Satellite - though we have subscribed to Netflix for $9 / month). We don’t eat in fancy restaurants, nor go out much at all for that matter. We try our best to live lightly and responsibly.

Why the hell would we do this?

The short answer is simply that the old saying is true - money does not buy happiness. It has been a number of years since I’ve really enjoyed high tech, and in the last few years I’ve been quite miserable in it. Not only from the job itself, but moreso from the doomsday feeling I had that my family’s well being depended so much on me and that I had no choice. The feeling of complete lack of freedom was far worse than the dislike I had for my job, and it was not until I finally lost my job at Nortel that I realised just how free I really was. It truly was a revelation for me, and I’m so glad we are at the point where we are starting to turn the corner with this in mind.

But just as much as this, my reason has to do with something I’ve said many times to my brewer friends. Invariably when you sit around and chat with a bunch of homebrewers in Canada, someone is going to start to bitch and moan about the microbrew situation here, and how it is so much better in the US. My standard response in that situation is to tell that person if they are not happy with there being so few micro breweries here, then they should simply put their money where their mouth is and start one themself. In my situation, as most of you know I am an avid local-food, anti-corporate-food advocate who certainly likes to talk the talk. Well, now it is time I put my money where my mouth is and walked the walk. I believe very strongly that there needs to be more small food producers like the one I now work for, and I told my new boss already that my goal is to stay there for 5 or 10 years and then go elsewhere and start my own shop. It may not even be financially possible for me to do that, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Right now I need to concentrate on the skills I need. When I first talked to my now boss in person about a position it was a few days after I’d emailed him my resume. We had the whole family out there buying some things for our Christmas dinner, and I saw him standing there and knew by the way he was talking to people that he was the boss (even though he was speaking French, which I do not understand). I said to him “so, are you hiring any trainees to become a butcher?”. He looked at me slowly and said “Are you pulling my leg, are are you serious”. As we chatted, he then went on to say how difficult it is to find someone who wants to be a meat cutter. All the more reason why I should become one - because someone has to or it will soon die out and that portion of our food chain will fall completely into big corporate hands.

Another reason for wanting to get off the high tech crack is something that I’ve alluded to above - it is an addiction that takes control of your life and turns you into a slave for it. For the money. No matter how much money you have, you’ll find a way to spend it. And it will start to blurr the lines between ‘want” and “need” to such a point that you get paralyzed with fear the way we were, at the very thought of that money disappearing.

And on a related note, there is another reason which has to do with something a friend told me a few years ago - when you learn to live on as little money as possible you can get to a point where you are working less to earn that money, and have more free time on your hands. And this sets you up for a very nice retirement even if you don’t have a lot of money, because you simply have so few needs. As far as me personally goes, I’d be happy to live under a bridge and eat out of garbage cans as long as I had a family that loved me. Of course, I don’t think the rest of my family are in that same position mentally so it is a bit of a moot point not to be taken literally, but the point is still there I think - that’s where my head is and hopefully over time I can bring my family to that same place. That’s not to say I am trying to convince my family to live under a bridge and eat out of garbage cans - don’t take me so literally on that! I just mean that one should be just as happy doing so, as otherwise.

Related to the previous item is this one - learning to be responsible with money. Our big problem was that we got dumped into a high paying lifestyle before we had any money skills, and so while wallowing in all that money we were simply pissing most of it away. This time around we have no choice but to learn to be responsible with money. So in the future if we do manage to make a lot of money again sometime, we will hopefully be more responsible with it. Something I always wanted to do but never managed, for example, was to donate 10% of my income to charity. We got as high as 5% but no higher. In hindsight it should have been pretty easy to get to 10% and possibly even more. Hopefully we’ll get another shot at it some day, and do it right this time.

Something else which is important to me is to not lose touch with the reality that some people have for a life, financially speaking. I’ve always been an advocate for the poor and the working poor, and I like to think that I’ve managed to maintain that perspective even when I was making all that money. Well, now I’m living the life of the working poor. There is no longer any need to speculate. This evening I went to the supermarket to pick up a few veggies for the taco salad I was making for supper, and I looked long and hard at the prices. 2 bucks for a scrawny head of lettuce. Fortunately the green onions were only 69 cents - not sure why so cheap. I also picked up a rutabaga since I really like them in soup and pot roast - so I looked over them all very carefully so as to get the biggest, because the price was per unit not per pound. In the past I would often pick the smallest one so that there would be less of a chance of waste. I had to pass by my favorite type of potato because in checking the price I realised they were way more expensive per pound than the cheap bag of potatoes I ended up getting. From now on, every single 5 dollar bill matters. In the past, I’d buy what I wanted, when I wanted.

Which brings me to another reason - humility and being humble. It is difficult to do when you make a pile of money. In fact, as I’ve seen at Nortel, so many of the people making those sums of money are precisely the opposite - arrogant, self-righteous, and they have completely lost touch with the plight of the poor and working poor. It is all their fault for being poor, of course. Certainly not everyone and probably not even a majority - but definitely a significant double-digit percentage of people by my estimation. I need some time to come down to earth to make sure I know who I am and what I am doing on this planet.

And related to this is the fact that I’m Buddhist, and believe in “right work”, which is part of the Noble Eightfold Path. Basically your occupation should be a reflection of who you are morally and spiritually, and vice versa. This butcher job is not a perfect match since they use feedlot beef from far-away Alberta, but it is a lot closer a match than where I was. And if I think of it as a step in the right direction toward me opening that perfect shop myself, this is the perfect job for me. We can’t fix everything about ourselves and our lives overnight - one step at a time. This is a huge leap, so even when it is not perfect, it is still significant.

Then there is the fact that I really like physical work. I always have. In this job the physical component is quite significant, throwing around all those huge chunks of animal. I’ve lost 3 pounds in the first week, which I attribute to my new job. And here is hoping that I’ll have a few more weeks like that because I could stand to lose 10 or 15 more. I end every day with a sore body, but it is a good sore. The kind you get when you’ve had a good workout.

So, there are a lot of reasons for doing this. Some of them are bigger than the rest, but all of them are important and they all add up to this being the right thing. And the only real downside is the money. Sure, it could well happen that a year from now - or even a month from now - I find that butchery is not my thing. We’ll see when I get there. But there are other great jobs out there. One that I applied for a few months but did not get was to work for a local organic food store as a liason with local farmers, sourcing produce. Wow, that would have been fantastic! So there are jobs out there which suit me - I just need to keep an open mind, and set some realistic expectations. Now that I know I’m free as a bird as far as this sort of thing goes, the world is my oyster!