Follow up:
My dentist is 8 minutes walk away from me. My doctor is 40 minutes walk away or 20 min by bus (because I have to walk to bus). I work mostly out of my home office, but when I do have to be in downtown Toronto, I can make it with 45 min of PT (or 12 - 25 min of driving, depending on traffic). My brother and the rest of my family are all ~30 min drive away, but some are readily reachable by public transport in ~30 min.
This is not by accident. I made a conscious choice about where to live and what jobs to accept and how to go about things by prioritizing low commute times and access to green space. I used to have a really great dentist. Not only he is good at what he does, he is a genuinely caring human being (both for his patients and for strangers). I remained with him for a while as his office moved further and further away. But eventually I switched to someone who was 10 min walk away from my office (I didn't work much from home then). Once I started working from home, I changed my dentist and doctor accordingly.
For most of my contracts, in Toronto, NYC, and LA, I lived within 15 minutes of walk from my work. I'd literally knock on the building next to the office and ask if they could rent me a space. Usually by the time I was a couple of blocks away I had found a reasonable place. Morgan Stanley once paired me up with one of their workers who would fly to Manhattan everyday (he had a small hydroplane that he'd land on Hudson). Nortel agreed to assign staff to helping me find suitable residence in Montreal. If the contract is in a remote location that I cannot find a suitable residence nearby, I turn them down. I have "lost" a lot of important and profitable contracts that way. If the contract requires me to commute in inconvenient or long ways (as was the case for a 6-day contract in Saskatoon in the middle of winter), I add the price of commute and the special residence to the contract rate. Sometimes that means losing the business.
This is not a matter of luck - nor am I one of those wizards that the industry must hire. I have simply adapted my lifestyle and career to each other according to my priorities. And I have been willing to pay the price for what I want (I find that a lot of people have problem with this last part). Part of that price was that when I was young, none of my friends or relatives wrote my phone number in ink, because my address (and therefore my phone number - ya, we're talking about the old days!) was changing every single year. My friends joked that I was the only person who measured time in units of "girlfriends." But I was never into having long distance relationships - and that was another part of the price. It also meant that I kept minimal furniture and belongings and mostly rented furnished places, unless the contract was long enough to justify buying (and potentially leaving behind) the furniture. This led to an interesting (and light) life. I got to travel across much of Australia by simply working in ranches and farms in exchange for room and board and some pocket change. I was equally happy with high rate contracts in Sydney and other big cities.
Life is what we make of it. Nobody gets to have it all. Most of us have plenty of things to be unhappy about. The trick, I've found, is to be happy that we can make the choices we do even when those choices are not ideal. Like I am happy for all the meds that I take even though some have inconvenient side effects, because without them my joint pains would be unbearable...and it's a lot better than being unhappy that I have to take the meds. |
