I got a call from a recruitment agent a few weeks ago. I get them all the time, mostly from agents checking up on my availability. He was looking to fill a permanent position, but I told him I was a contractor. He asked if I would consider permanent employment. I told him I wasn’t interested. He asked me why.

I’ve never had an agent ask me why I wouldn’t work permie before. The answer was too long winded to give to a guy who called me cold, so I told him that I was a contractor and that’s all there was too it. But, I do have my reasons.

I’ve been offered permanent employment in quite a few contracts before. When I politely decline, I get the same response – “I suppose the money’s too good as a contractor, huh?” But that’s not the motivation at all.

The main reason I work the way I do is for the freedom. I like to choose the work I do based on how interesting the company or project seems. I also like the idea that I will move on at the end of the job.

I suppose I’ve been burned in permanent employment before, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like having to ask for raises, or get permission to take a few weeks off, or have someone tell me what they thought I should be learning. I hated working longer hours or weekends because there was a promise of a year-end bonus based on how hard I worked. I hated staying in the same place, hoping that the environment would get better around me and feeling stuck where I was.

Moving from permanent employment to contracting was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. I was so afraid for myself and my family. I didn’t know if I would get any work at all. I looked at my kids and thought about how selfish I was to leave a perfectly good job just because I hated it. I worried about losing my house, or not being able to buy food, or not having any presents at Christmas time.

But soon I found work. Then I found more. Then, I ended up in situations where I was practically in a contracting “job for life”, but that bothered me and I knew it was time to move on.

I work harder than most people I know to keep my skills up and stay sharp. My competence is my job security. The competence I have today won’t be sufficient for tomorrow, so learning never stops. I get teased for being the guy who codes on his own at weekends– but I love having some control over my destiny.

Now, the most comforting thing about my work is the end date on each contract. During my first contract, which was only 10 weeks, I was terrified about what I would do at the end of it. Unlike I did as a permanent employee, I started saving for being out of work. Luckily, I found a job immediately after that one ended, but I’m still always ready. When redundancy or a bad market hits, when redundancies are announced and no work can be found, I’m prepared psychologically and financially. The old ‘premie’ me permie would have been one of those sob stories you see on the news about a guy who was laid off after working 24 years with a company and now can’t find any work. With an end date, I know when I’ll be out of work—and I’m working now to make sure I’m marketable when that happens.

I don’t necessarily see myself as being a contractor forever– in fact, my work on Overpass is trying to break me out of that cycle. I don’t want to be a 50-year-old software developer (or even a 40-year-old one), but I love the work I do and have a hard time leaving it behind.

I may change my tune one day. Permanent employment is one of my fall-backs if one day everything goes horribly wrong. So is my teaching degree. So are my language skills. But for now, I love what I do.

I’ll take freedom over security any day.

The last day of 2010. It’s been a good year.

On the work front, I didn’t work too much. The work I did do was pretty cool to work on. In previous years, the majority of the year was spent working, but not this year.

I also went to Paris this year. That was very cool. I wanted to go somewhere a bit farther away, but that would have meant working more . . .

I started meditating this year, and I think I’m really feeling the benefits. I’m very calm and tend the focus less on the past. When my mind does take me away into self-doubt or agitation, I’m conscious of it happening and can try to stop it. I try to meditate every day, but it’s not easy always finding a quiet place. During the week, when I get up early, it’s perfect.

This year I ran another half-marathon. My time wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either.

I’m looking forward to 2011, although I have no idea what it will bring. My current contract runs out at the end of January, so it’s kind of an unknown after then. I’m running the Reading Half Marathon and the London Marathon this year. Hopefully, I’ll get back to the States for a while. But aside from this, the future is wide open.

As always, I’ve been thinking about some resolutions for this year. I think the biggest one I make is to write more. Not necessarily on this blog, but just to write more often. I have so many anecdotes or ideas that I’ve started writing, but get distracted by other things and never finish them. I also think of loads of things to write about here, but never get around to it when I sit down. So that’s what I’m going to try to work on this year.

I hope you’ve had a great 2010 and will have an even better 2011.

We had about 3 or 4 inches of snow on Saturday.  This is very exciting in England.  It causes chaos all over the place.  On Monday, the airports were still closed.  If you listen to the radio, you’d think there was a natural disaster outside –don’t go out unless you absolutely need to.

It seems silly when you think of places where they really get snow, but England doesn’t have the infrastructure for this type of weather. 

On Saturday morning, we woke up to a Winter Wonderland outside.  I was going to do a 10-mile run as I’ve done the last few Saturdays.  Instead, I ran about a half a mile until I came to a road with cars trying to drive up a snowy road and getting nowhere.  So, I spent a while helping people by pushing their cars uphill.  Then, I ran the short distance back home and got into a snowball fight with my kids.

Every night since Saturday, the news has had one story—“Why can’t England handle snow?”  Why is there such chaos on the roads?  Why is transportation so affected?  We got the same story last year when we had a surprising amount of snow—and the year before that.

Actually, I think England is perfect for snowy weather.  Although I grew up in San Diego, where we never got snow, I have lived for a few years in Missouri where it snowed a lot.  On the first snowfall day, I made a snowman (I was like 24, but it was a novelty to me), but then the snow stayed for months.  Toward the end, you get so sick of snow and ice and cold.  In England, you have to take advantage and enjoy it because it will be gone in a few days.

I’m sitting here in the early morning getting ready for my last day of work for the year an it’s snowing again outside.  That means more weather warnings and traffic chaos.  But all in all, I love these snowy days.

So, I watched the Silverlight Firestarter keynote where some of the Silverlight 5 features were revealed and have to say that it all looks really good. 

There were some pretty impressive interfaces demo’d. 

I’m so tired of hearing how Microsoft is dumping Silverlight.  The keynote alleviated some of those fears, I hope.

The biggest benefit, I think, will be the ability to put breakpoints in xaml databinding.  Most of the Silverlight problems I have are trying to figure out if the INotifyPropertyChanged event was fired for an element in my gui. 

So, life will be easier . . . by the end of next year.

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday for me.  To me, it’s like a holiday that used to be really important, but then everyone in the world stopped celebrating it. 

Of course, it’s just as important as it was when I was a kid, but in England it doesn’t exist.  I just got back from my morning run (still sweating) and just realised that today is Thanksgiving.  To the world around me, it’s a day like any other.

When I first moved here, I told myself that I would hold tightly to my American childhood.  I would cook a turkey every Thanksgiving and have fireworks every fourth of July.  Hell, maybe I’ll even hang a big ol’ American flag in front of my house like I did when I was living in a small town in Missouri.  My house was going to be like an U.S. Embassy—US soil in a foreign land.  Well, the zeal wore off years ago.  Life keeps moving on and you have to move on with it.

But then, again, I suppose Thanksgiving doesn’t have a hold on me just because I was born in a land that celebrates it.  Increasingly, maybe because of age, I find myself less concerned with who I was and more concerned with who I am.  When I sit in meditation, for example, I try to focus on the current moment and leave the past where it belongs—as a construct of my own memory.  In a sense, the Eric Wroolie who I identify myself with—the American kid who likes baseball and fast-food—doesn’t really exist at all.  I have only what I have now.  Even the America I remember changes every time I go back—so I identify more with a memory than with the reality.  But I’m definitely not English—the accent always gets in the way.  In a way, the “nationality” of things is really unimportant.  Whoa, didn’t mean to try to get deep here—it must be the running high.

Well, anyway, happy Thanksgiving to all my family and friends back in the States.  Today for me will be a day like any other day, but I will occasionally stop and remember that today is actually a holiday and I will think about my family coming together back home.

I was terrible about doing homework when I was a kid.  It was always so much easier to think of the excuse I was going to use the next day than it was to turn off the TV and just do it.

I can remember too many occasions when the teacher would collect homework and try to name-and-shame me in front of the class.  “Where is your homework, Eric?”

“I didn’t do it,” I said while looking down at my desk and hoping the teacher would just move on to someone else.  I figured if I looked pitiful enough, he would leave me alone.

“Well, why didn’t you do it?” he would insist.  I could see his legs at the edge of my desk as he towered above me waiting for an answer.  He wasn’t going to accept that as my only answer. The whole class’ attention was on me.  I could feel my face getting hot with embarrassment, but hey, Knight Rider was worth it.

So, I gave the teacher the go-to answer for everything.  I give him the answer that I’m sure all teachers loathe—“I forgot.”

Towards the end of the school year, they usually gave up on me.  My parents tried everything to get me to do my homework, too.  But it was so easy to lie about how much homework I had.  Besides, I had a busy schedule starting with He-Man at 3:30 and ending with whatever prime time show was on that night before 9.

As I got older, the homework load got heavier and the likelihood of me doing it was much smaller.  My aversion to homework, along with my truancy habit, were the reasons I failed several classes in high school and went to Summer school ever year to make them up. My dad still talks about how he wasn’t sure whether I would graduate from high school at all.  I never even applied to any colleges.

I can remember my mom telling me that homework was a part of life and that I would get homework all the time when I grew up and went to work.  I didn’t really believe this.  Grown-ups don’t have any homework.

Now, I do have homework.  But here’s the big difference—the homework is not mandatory.  That really makes it difficult to do.

Now, I will sit down in the evenings with a big computer book read chapter after boring chapter of a subject which might not interest me in the slightest, but I need to know it.  I look at this homework the same way I look at running on a cold morning—there are hundreds of reasons not to do it, but one or two compelling reasons to do it.

Now, my job is to stay competitive and relevant in a market that is always moving.  Now I must stay ahead of technology that is always shifting.  Now, I sell the skills and knowledge that’s contained in between my ears.  My competition for work is not just in London, but in America, China, India, and the rest of the world.

So, I have to keep building that knowledge.  That means homework and studying.  What makes it easier is that not everyone does this.  To many people, if the boss doesn’t demand it, or if it can’t be a prominent bullet-point on the cv, it’s not worth learning.  The phrase I hear again and again is “The last thing I want to do when I get home from a long day at work is think about computers.”

But I’ve also worked with a lot of really good people who will browse the tech manuals on the trains or watch tutorial videos in the evenings to constantly educate themselves too.

I remember listening to a Brian Tracy tape years ago where he said (I’m paraphrasing), that you give eight hours to your employer and ever added hour goes to building you.

So, now I know the importance of homework and evening study.  Life would have been a lot easier if I learned it earlier.