You never know when it all could be over

As Eminem says. 

r/TheWildRobot was just suggested to me. I joined. I haven't seen the film. 

Fun fact: I got hired at DreamWorks as a Department Technical Director in 2022, and started shortly after my Adobe internship ended. While doing training and shadowing, I was told that I was most likely going to work on The Wild Robot. Nobody really knew anything about it yet and I certainly wasn't allowed to say the title to anyone. 

However, there was an extreme need for more people on Trolls 3, so I got reassigned to that. After Trolls ended, Wild Robot was already fully staffed and my requests to work on the Bad Guys 2 repeatedly were ignored (Bad Guys is my favorite DreamWorks movie) and instead I got laid off in 2023 after a brief stint on one of the pipeline teams. 

If that reassignment hadn't happened, I would still be at DreamWorks. I don't think anyone on The Wild Robot got laid off. And my name would be on those credits. 

To be clear, I loved working on Trolls -- I'm in the fandom! -- but of course Wild Robot would've been insane. More importantly, I could still be a DreamWorker right now. And I wouldn't be doing hellish late Sunday night deployments. 

I want to watch the Wild Robot. That's why I joined the subreddit. I KNOW it's good. And I know too that I didn't touch a single frame of it. 

So I don't know if I can.

I'm not sure bad things are "meant to be" or anything. I don't really believe in all that feel-good shit. I'm not sure the path I'm on now is objectively better than if I was still at DreamWorks. I think I'd be much happier if I was still there. I understand that I should be grateful for the opportunity I had, logically, but emotionally, I feel only disappointment at everything I had for such a brief time. 

It struck my heart only once,

Which made me want it more. 

The emptiness it left in me

Will always need to be filled

For it will be there all the time,

From now on, and forevermore. 

- Woods of Ypres

I wanted to stay at DreamWorks for the rest of my life. That was the plan. That was THE end game.  

All subsequent attempts to get back into NBCUniversal and Adobe have failed. Meanwhile, kids I TAed for in Advanced Programming Concepts are senior software engineers at big companies. And I'm just...stuck at a stressful company with no CI/CD and 10 days PTO. 

Sometimes bad people do bad things, sometimes heartless sociopathic CEOs outsource and cut,  sometimes bad things just happen and no one knows why and the hurt and the sadness just...never go away. 

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