This past weekend I travelled to Nashville, TN (well, technically right outside Nashville in the Franklin/Brentwood area) to volunteer at Jon Acuff’s Quitter conference. In case you are unfamiliar with Jon Acuff, he is the author of the blog and book “Stuff Christians Like” which is all Christian satire. His more recent book though, “Quitter”, deals with bridging the gap between your day job and your dream job and that’s what this conference was on….how to practically and wisely make your dream job a reality. I had volunteered at this conference back in July so it was great getting to work with the same people again. Amanda (my sister) drove up and came with me this time so we got to spend the weekend together hanging out which was great. We are basically the same person manifested in two different ways. Rachel also drove over from Arkansas for the weekend and Jon, who went on the Uganda trip with us, lives in the area so he spent the weekend helping too. It was great getting to see them again. Rachel and I had gotten pretty close while living together so we were able to catch up and laugh and laugh and laugh….which is what we do when we’re together.
When I was telling my brother about the weekend and the conference he asked me “So what’s your dream job?” My answer, “Ahhhhh……ahhhh….” The thing I first thought of was being a wife and mother, but that’s not something you can exactly work towards or quit your job to achieve….there are a few crucial missing steps that I don’t control lol. So I told something that involved some combination of missions, social justice, kids/teens/young adults, Christian living, and travel. He responded with “Well that’s good, but you don’t really get paid for any of that.” Thanks Alex, welcome to my life lol.
I also spent the weekend editing a trip packet for Kissito, another organization we were helping out. It was a very frustrating endeavor for multiple reasons I won’t get into, but one of the reasons was because after putting in a LOT of long hours on the packet, the program I was using decided it was going to freak out and quit on me. Now, this itself didn’t concern me to much as the program auto saves your document an annoyingly every 3 seconds or so and I had saved about 4 versions of it. The problem came when I reopened the program it had apparently decided it hated me with a fiery passion and had deleted ALL edited copies of the file. Gone. Poof. Missing. Unrecoverable. All that it would give me was the unedited version without the 8+ hours of edits in it. I was about to cry. Thankfully when the program deleted everything I was working on it left a messed up version of the file I had put in the trash on my computer. The file was completely missing about 5 pages but it did have the majority of other edits I had already made. Though it stilled caused me a lot of extra work to rebuild the file, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been and I was able to get it done in time. Lesson from this story….computers hate me. Only to me would a brand new iMac hard drive crap out before I had a chance to back it up (this happened this past December) and then a Mac program freak out and delete only the files I was working on and needed. I have other horrible computer stories I could share too, but I won’t bore you with incredibly bad luck.
Tags: dream job, iMac, Jon Acuff, lost files, Quitter, volunteer
