On Burnout

A Great Friend has a case of Burn Out. I can sympathize.

I spent darn near 20 years in the Semiconductor Industry working at everything from operator to product specialist. A number of those years were spent as a road whore. Yup that was the right choice of words. I was paid to travel and service customers. At one point I spent 8 months on the road in and out of country and saw misbeHaven a total of two weeks. Not all at one time though, a weekend here and there and four days @ Christmas then back on the road. That was loads of not fun.

Around then, misbeHaven got an offer for a position that was too big personally and professionally to pass up. Problem was, that meant moving and there was no semiconductor industry here. That meant a job and career change. Unfortunately, that also meant a pay cut for me. So, she made the move and we lived apart like we did when we first got married. Finally it came time for me to make the move. I will save the story about the tornado that hit our apartment while we were moving for another post.

I started out selling Toyota's at the local dealer. Man did I suck at that. I did get to test drive the snot out of the new Tundra's before they came out though and that was a hoot. I just couldn't do the deed to get deals to close. Eventually all the resumes and applications I had put out there started to pay off with an interview at the A&M Wind Tunnel. I ended up taking about a 65% or so pay cut but have not been happier at work in a very long time. I actually enjoy getting up and going to work now. Flushing the years in semiconductor process equipment and having to learn things all over again was a bit of a challenge but it was the right thing to do for a number of reasons.

This all came to a head for me last week when we had a tour of engineers from a customer come through to learn about the testing we do. I gave the tour and at the end three different engineers commented that it was the best tour they had had in their collection of tours on campus. One asked how much I liked my job because is showed during the tour. It dawned on my that I really did enjoy work. I explained that in making the change out of the semiconductor industry that I now made less money but I enjoyed the variety of work that I do and the rather interesting/odd/fun things that we get to test and I work with a group of folks that like to have fun at work. Hence the last post.

Burnout sucks and until you get through it and into the recovery side. But once you do it can be a really good thing.