11/07/2014
Simple, I'm an 18 year old male trying to make it in the world. I have high ambitions and hope to travel the world.
This is where it all started. In little school I got bullied by a girl who eventually ended up being my girlfriend (be it all of two weeks-which at that time seemed a life time). Since then I have felt that no matter what stands in my way, no matter what challenges I will face in my life time; I can conquer them and I will use them to my advantage. I was quite fortunate to grow up with a family who pushed me to my full potential without putting me in an uncomfortable position. This isn't a story of how my family made me practice an instrument 40 hours a week and made me do 'homework' every night, even if there was none. See,I was never shouted at for bad grades, probably because I would come home with a lot and they just gave up. I was an average student in class who never underachieved but at the same time, never overachieved. I was what my mum would say "far too laid back for my liking". I was called the clown of the class by teachers throughout my 8 years of school, even though I personally never tried to be funny.
School was a drag; full of groups of hormonal pubescent children who hate each other but always fight for popularity, as it turns out- three years on- it's now the squares who are happy because they are popular amongst their peers and friends. Where as the popular kids are all going through depression or something else attention seeking. The only thing I enjoyed about school was leaving at 3.15pm Monday-Friday and not being in on a Saturday and Sunday. The only reasons I would ever enjoy going to school was if at the time, I was going through a little flirty phase or even in a relationship with a girl in there.
I'd spend time with friends or family whenever I was out of school until about the age of 13, where I then started to do some manual labour for prices that poor little starving Ethiopians wouldn't even work for, honestly. I worked a lot of manual labour from the age of 13. Kitchen Fitting, Trench Digging, Sand moving, Demolition, Carpentry, Tool Carrying. I even started a little Gardening/Outdoor Maintenance job for myself as little weekend jobs, doing jobs for people in the neighbourhood. I'd save up for a new lawn mower or a new pressure jet was to use just so I could put more things on the list of what I was capable of, and of course 'bump the price up'. I loved getting out there and working. Getting out there and earning.
When I left school, I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do in the future. My dad suggested being a dentist or an architect as a joke a couple of times, because he said it was good money. Personally, I am enchanted by the idea of having enough money that money would no longer be an issue. Of course, every one dreams about it. But I personally feel it in my bones, head to toe that i'm going to be the one they talk about. I'm going to be the one who made it out of a small council estate and into my own million pound estate. That of course is the dream.
I left and joined a community college and studied Art & Design, I bought a camera to try a little bit of photography too. The reason I chose Art was because I was -as blunt as this is- good at it. I could draw, its as simple as that. For some reason, when I was growing up, I had a passion in drawing. My parents and grandparents were always amazed and wished that I would keep up the passion and perhaps pursue it as a career. But, an Architect was the highest paid career I could find which I could connect to 'Art & Money',
Whilst in college, I kept up with the Outdoor Maintenance. A neighbour who I had worked with in the past requested that I maintain his garden so that it looked like his house was vacant for 8 months, while he went and stayed at his beach house in Spain. He literally approached me like that. "Wanna' look after my garden while me and Sue go to our beach house for 8 months?" of course I said yeah, because it was 2 doors away from my house and was already a looked after property so it was of no bother to just do an hours work whenever I got the chance.
Each time I was working on his property, I would wonder how he was, in Spain; probably on a golden beach; or looking over a golden beach and into the sunset over the ocean from the balcony on his beach house. I would come up with scenarios as to what he was doing compared to my cheap labour. I remembered that a couple of years ago, I went and carried his tools around for him for 3 days in a row. He was an Air Conditioning Engineer, who specialised in Installation. He could afford to pay me -the most i had ever been paid, for the easiest job of my life, at the age of 15- £60 each day, for 7 hours of work which consisted of me carrying his tool bag into the building and every 5 minutes handing him a tool. I asked him what he was doing, watched how he was doing it and he revealed a lot of information about the trade that he was in.
After remembering bits of what he was doing and what he had explained to me that day, I done some revision online about Air Conditioning. I grew fond of the idea, of becoming an Air Conditioning Engineer, or starting a career within the trade. As it goes, there are a lot of similar trades which over-lap each other. For example- Air Conditioning, Cooling, Heating, HVAC "Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning", Ducting and Refrigeration. This is probably boring you, but this is what a blog is about. Right? I continued to research it and grew more and more fond of the idea of being AN AIR CON' ENGINEER. Every time I told someone that, I received the response "yeah, there's a lot of money in that". Which of course, made me think I was one step closer to looking over the golden beach from my beach house.
Unfinished
(it's bed time)
03/09/2015
..Continued a few days short of 14 months later,
A lot has happened with in the 14 months. I'm 20 now.
Reading back on what I wrote just over a year ago, my life sounded interesting and like I was going to branch out and tell you all about by time I turned 18, I was a millionaire.
Truth is, I'm still an apprentice air conditioning engineer who has only just jumped up to the minimum wage* from the minimum apprenticeship wage, *which the government has decided is wrongly worded so decided to call 'minimum living allowance' as if anyone could ever live off £5.13 an hour.
I drive, which works out around the same price to travel to and from the office every morning as it would be on the train. To actually make any sort of living from the 'minimum living allowance' one would have to live within walking distance to their workplace head office and not be paying any rent for a house or paying off any mortgage, but instead; paying 'keep' to parents or in my case, a grandparent.
Yes, air conditioning is a good trade to have behind you and yes, you can travel the world and do air conditioning in pretty much any country. That is if you don't get stuck with a mortgage or have children or a partner, which of course means your dreams of working in the sun and spending your weekends on the beach are going to stay a dream, just like every single engineer who works for the firm I am completing my apprenticeship with. But this isn't quite what I had in mind when I told you previously that I would like to travel the world. Even when I become rich, I would feel uncomfortable if I didn't have to get up every morning and leave the house early to do some labour.
Basically, other than also working on the weekends in another underpaid overworked job, which is in a bar -I've worked in a bar every weekend since I was of legal age to serve alcohol- there's not much more to add other than the odd little money making ideas I have come up with over the years, which I will add further on.
I will keep you updated when I get another one and tell you the results.
My life is not much to write about so far. I live every day as if it's my last, of course with the obvious limits because 99.9999...% of the time, I will be waking up the next day and don't want to have to face people who I told how I really feel about them.
...I hope to continue this over the next few days, I actually have a lot I would like to tell but, don't have the time. I would like to tell you about my brother and cousin. You won't get that, but I do. Until next time.
