As an intro to this, my weekly column on being a father-of-two working a dead-end job in my favorite city, I’ll give you some background on myself. Tag line from one of my favorite movies: “Work Sucks.” As much as this is my mantra, I think that until you’ve devoted yourself to something, it’s hard to truly enjoy success. I really believe if you’re not doing something you enjoy, you’re wasting your time. Employment isn’t synonymous with hell. Where does the balance lie between dream career and the place you loathe five to seven times a week?

I love music. Early in life, I was identified as someone with a lot of talent who happened to be extremely lazy. I didn’t like to practice, I didn’t like to do homework. Knowing that I wouldn’t last long waiting tables while a music career took off, my parents steered me in another direction. I don’t know that I was any better at math and science than I was at music, but engineering probably led to a more sure-fire he-won’t-be-living-with-us (in 30 years) career path.

I admit that in high school and in college, Software Engineering seemed like an OK choice. I think a major component of that was I enjoyed wasting time on the Internet and playing games. Consequently, most of the pre-career ‘work’ I did was just like solving math problems or puzzles (which is still an enjoyable pastime).

When I was finished with college, I felt ill-prepared to enter a development career (I’m still not sure why) and decided to accept a job with IBM testing components of a Websphere-based product suite. Well, that was no fun. I returned to Columbia and (not knowing any better) co-founded an IT consulting firm. I add “not knowing any better” because rather than making a decision based on where I either 1) knew I’d be happy or 2) where there was a market need, I made the decision on where I thought I could be successful. I actually wanted to start a music production company. What? Yeah, I don’t know. When that inevitably failed, my wife was pregnant with our first daughter, and I figured it would be a good idea to get a job that had insurance so my wife wouldn’t have to work. The motivation for that decision was flawless, the execution was without merit. Another gift of a daughter later, and I’m still here.

I think I’m starting to see what I should have done a long time ago, but now my primary responsibility is to take care of my amazing family. The cost of that responsibility is that I’m often not accessible to them. Even when I’m there, work has left me too frustrated to be good company.

I’m already gone for work by the time my three beauties wake up; I leave early so that I can have enough daytime hours to pursue the projects that I’d like to eventually transition from moonlighting to career. At work, I’m a lowly software tester. This means that I effectively do about 10 menial tasks over and over again all day, every day to discover where problems lie in software systems. I’m not bragging when I say “I’m smarter than this,” because it wouldn’t take a whole lot.

So the goal (which I’ll chronicle in this column) is to ditch this habit. I’ll move from wasting my life to the solace of a rewarding and meaningful existence where I can be an amazing dad and have stories to tell my grandkids. I’ve got a long way to go.