Photo of a drink bottle being poured out onto a laptop keyboard. The laptop is sitting on a wooden table outside, next to a house, with trees and a sunset in the background. AI-generated.

🪦 R.I.P. My Tech Career: 2010-2022

It’s time to call it. Pour one out for my career in tech. It’s dead.

It was killed by the one-two punch of layoffs and the worst job market I’ve experienced in my entire professional life. At my former employer and across the tech industry, uncaring executives are desperately trying to limit the damage they inflicted on their companies through reckless spending and over-expansion during the ZIRP era, and professionals like me are suffering the ongoing consequences.

I loved my job. I loved the company, the mission, the leadership, the work, and the coworkers. For most of the past 18 months since it was unceremoniously taken from me I have been searching for a decent replacement. I wasn’t naïvely thinking that I would find another dream job–just a place to work where I can make enough money to pay the bills and feel marginally good about what I’m doing. Unfortunately, after many hundreds of applications, a very small handful of interviews, and an endless stream of rejections and ghostings, I’ve come up utterly empty-handed.

This job market has left me defeated, dejected, and demoralized, and I’ve decided that I’ve had enough. I’m done spending hours a day searching for jobs that align with my skills, writing enthusiastic cover letters, fine-tuning my resume, filling out applications, and sending cold emails to hiring managers, all for literally zero return on my substantial investment of time and emotional energy. It’s time to move on.

Of course, I fully realize that a post like this is likely to turn off some potential employers, but apparently I’m already unemployable, as evidenced by the past 18 months, so I don’t really have anything to lose now, do I?

To be clear, I’m still open to gainful employment. It would be great to have a paycheck, paid time off, health insurance, and all that. If you are someone that I’ve worked with in the past and you have a job that you think I’d be great at, by all means, drop me a line, let’s chat! But I am done with the endless, hopeless, fruitless cycle of searches, applications, and rejections.

Barring some deus ex machina resolution where the perfect job just falls out of the sky into my lap, what does the next phase of my career even look like? Well, that’s still TBD. Obviously I’ll continue to work with my wife to make our little retail tea and spice shop Chai Cupboard successful. In fact, we’ve just launched a number of new initiatives on that front. If you enjoy tea, check out the website at ChaiCupboard.com to learn more. But that’s still a long way off from paying the bills for our family of four, so I’ll be launching another new venture in the very near future.

This was originally posted on LinkedIn.

exterior of a tea and spice shop called Chai Cupboard, with a large replica Moai outside

The Tough Reality of Running an Independent Retail Shop in Downtown Everett

It’s been just over two years since my wife and I opened the doors at Chai Cupboard, our loose leaf tea and spice shop in downtown Everett, and I thought it would be a good time to share how things are going for our little mom and pop shop. Can we call ourselves a mom and pop shop if we’re only in our 40s? Whatever, I’m going for it.

In short: It has been and continues to be difficult!

Starting up

Let’s start with what it took just to open our doors. We spent about $32,000 of our own money (no investments, no loans) to start up. This included things like buying the initial inventory, all our jars and other supplies, furniture, and putting in new flooring.

Finding a good location in downtown Everett was a challenge. It seemed like every space we looked at was either way too large (2,000+ square feet), way too expensive ($2,000+ a month), or both. The space we eventually landed in is around 1,100 square feet and costs us just under $1,800 a month. Plus electricity and gas. Plus parking. Plus basic building maintenance, repairs, and real estate taxes. You would think that those last few things should be the responsibility of the landlord that owns the building, but this particular landlord owns such a large portion of downtown Everett that they are able to dictate the terms of the lease to dramatically favor them and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. Fun!

a Shiba Inu named Maya lays contentedly in a ray of sunlight in front of a shelf full of glass jars that contain tea

Keeping the lights on

Okay, so let’s talk about ongoing costs. All together, running the shop five days a week, we need to make about $100 a day in profit to pay our basic bills. That means we need around $200 a day in sales to break even after paying for our inventory and other supplies. So far in 2023 we’re making an average of $117 per day in sales. That’s up from $100 per day during the same period in 2022, but still far short of where we need to be in order just to break even—and these figures are with no employees, just us (mostly my wife) running the shop entirely by ourselves. If we wanted to hire just a single employee at $20 an hour for 20 hours a week, the wages, taxes, and other costs would add up to another $2,000 a month or more than $100 a day.

All of this means that we’re putting about another $1,500 into the shop every month out of our pocket to keep the doors open. To date we have made around $55,000 in revenue, but spent a total of about $128,000, meaning that over $70,000 has come directly out of our pocket to try to make this work.

Expanding our horizons

Since it has been difficult selling enough loose-leaf tea and spices to make ends meet, we have been working on a few different ideas to try to bring in more money. The biggest of these plans was to open a full tea bar, serving things like tea lattes and iced tea. Unfortunately, our space is not equipped with the proper kitchen to obtain the necessary permits from the health department.

Our landlord was open to letting us pay to upgrade their space (how generous of them!) and we were able to get a grant from the city for about $16,000 that we thought would cover the plumbing improvements and appliances we would need. Unfortunately again, once we opened up the walls we discovered that the existing drainage was nowhere near sufficient for the amount of sinks the health department requires. Fixing this would require considerably more work than we originally expected, including cutting a trench into the concrete floor. Between the extra drainage work and the extreme inflation that ratcheted up the cost of everything else while we tried to figure it all out, the total cost of the project ballooned to over $50,000. three glass tea brewers, each with tea currently brewingWe applied for a second grant in hopes of still moving forward, but were denied. So the full tea bar idea is dead unless we find a whole new location with a proper restaurant kitchen, which would of course have much higher rent, somewhat negating the benefit of opening the tea bar at all.

Thankfully as long as we only serve hot tea in a to-go cup, we are not classified by the health code as a “food establishment,” so we can still do that without all of the extra sinks. We have been able to set up three tea brewers on a custom stand that I built out of hardwood, and at least provide a basic cup of tea to-go.

Building the physical and digital space

a custom-built wooden counter holding a register and some tea brewers, in a shop with brick walls and a shelf with jars in the background

Speaking of building furniture, the shop has given me a good excuse to spend some quality time with my woodworking tools. I built our custom shelves that hold all the jars, as well as the custom main counter, and I’m quite pleased with how they all turned out.

a shelf made of wood and pipe, full of glass jars with spices, in front of a brick wall

Surprisingly, building physical objects like the furniture has been easier than building things in the digital space. While we have had a basic website set up since before we opened, building a proper online shop has been a bit of a pain. Aside from the challenge of synchronizing all of our inventory with an online storefront, to get it properly set up we need to take individual photos of all 200+ of the teas and spices we sell, which is a daunting task.

Once we do get the online side of the store set up with all the photos, another idea we’ve had to increase sales is to set up a tea sampler subscription box, but the economics of subscription boxes is pretty rough. There are competitors in the space that sell a tea box for $20 that includes shipping. It would be difficult for us to make and ship a box of teas for less than $20 in actual cost to us.

So, what’s next?

We have really enjoyed running the shop, learning more about teas and spices, and meeting all the lovely people who have come in over the past two years. To date we have had nearly 2,000 customers, about 25% of which are repeat customers. We have had zero problems with crime, and only one unpleasant run-in with an individual having a drug-induced psychotic episode. Downtown Everett is a great location, and we love the increasing number of events that are happening downtown like Sorticulture, Salty Sea Days, and the Wintertide Festival & Market.

We’re convinced that our shop is a valuable addition to Everett, but it’s tough to keep pouring thousands of dollars into it every single month, and to be so far away from even being able to hire a single person to help out. It is beginning to feel like running a small independent retail shop in downtown Everett may not be viable with the current cost of rent, lack of significant downtown foot traffic, and most people’s default mode of shopping online first. We’ve still got over a year on our current lease, so we’re going to continue trying to make this work, but looking around at the other businesses downtown, it’s easy to see why they’re mostly restaurants, breweries/bars, coffee shops, or retailers who have been around forever and own their own building.

And of course, I haven’t even mentioned the other big complicating factor: In just a few weeks we’re having a baby! This means we’re going to have to dramatically cut back how many hours the shop is even open, due to the aforementioned inability to afford to hire any additional help.

Anyway, if you fancy some tea, stop on by! We’re at 2809 Colby in downtown Everett. And if you have some brilliant idea for how to make this type of business actually turn a profit, please drop me a line and share it!

a row of glass jars full of colorful spices, with white labels and gold lids, sitting on a wooden shelf in front of a brick wall

Well, it's Groundhog Day… again.

The Best Time Loops & Why Time Loops Aren’t Time Travel

In the spirit of Groundhog Day, I’d like to share my personal ranking of the best time loop movies/TV shows:

  1. Groundhog Day
  2. Russian Doll
  3. Cause and Effect (ST:TNG episode)
  4. Edge of Tomorrow
  5. Palm Springs
  6. Source Code
  7. Happy Death Day

Now, before you comment “why isn’t Tenet / Primer / [whatever other movie] on your list?!?” allow me a moment explain the difference between what I consider a “time loop” story and a “time travel” story. Although time loop stories do involve time travel, in my opinion they are a distinctly different genre.

  • Time travel: One or more people travel forward or backward through time, usually intentionally. Multiple instances of the person or people traveling through time may exist simultaneously.
  • Time loop: One or more people repeat a relatively fixed period of time over and over, usually against their will. Through any given loop there is only one instance of the person or people repeating the time period.

Even if a story covers the same period of time over and over like in Primer or Tenet, if there are multiple instances of the characters existing simultaneously, that’s a time travel story. And yes, I’ve seen the articles about Christopher Nolan’s claim that Tenet is “not a time-travel film.” He’s wrong. It obviously is. The characters are travelling back and forth through time. What would you call that if not time travel? ?

I also want to mention a couple of great video games that use the time loop mechanic: Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Outer Wilds . I’ve played these each just a bit, but sadly I haven’t had the time to finish either one. There’s also a 1986 novel called Replay by author Ken Grimwood that I’ve read and enjoyed.

Are there other great time loop movies, shows, or video games that I’ve missed? Let me know! I’m always on the lookout for great content in the genre.

Even more collisions and near misses at the intersection the City of Everett refuses to fix

Enjoy (?) this collection of near misses and collisions collected over the past year and a half. The City of Everett has declared the existing traffic controls at this intersection to be “appropriate” and they refuse to make any changes to the design.

Previously…

And of course these are just the ones that happened while we were home and checked the camera after hearing the commotion.

Update: One of my neighbors contacted the city yet again to request some sort of improvement at this intersection and the similar one a block north. Here is the city’s reply, in part:

It appears that no crashes have been reported to the Everett Police at the intersection of 36th Street and Wetmore Ave in recent years. The intersection of 35th Street and Wetmore Ave does have an average of 1.5 reported crashes per year, but only about 1 crash every 2 years results in any injuries. While ideally there would be no vehicle crashes in Everett, the low incidence of injuries in this area is considered acceptable to the City.

Tugboat with stuck horn at Port of Everett

Listen to the tugboat’s stuck fog horn at Port of Everett that kept my neighborhood up all night

Sunday night just as I was about to go to bed, I heard a strange noise coming from outside. It wasn’t too loud so I didn’t think much of it, but then I got a notification that someone had just started a thread on my neighborhood’s Nextdoor page: “Boat horn/siren 11pm?” When I got onto Nextdoor, there were two other threads that were rapidly filling up with people complaining about the noise, which was apparently really loud in parts of the neighborhood. There was speculation that maybe it was coming from a train, or maybe a boat at the Port or the Navy base.

So of course, instead of going to bed I decided to hop in my car and go try to find the source of the noise and get it on video:

It turns out the noise was coming from a tugboat with a stuck horn, as first reported that night by My Everett News:

The tugboat horn did not stop until around 3:30 AM, keeping many people awake for most of the night. In the follow-up story the next day on My Everett News, they included a photo of the offending boat, which you can actually see in my video starting at around 1:25:

Tugboat with stuck horn at Port of Everett

Tugboat with stuck horn at Port of Everett (click to enlarge)

A lot of people must have been disappointed that they missed out on the sound of the horn, because my video turned out to be fairly popular. It was featured on a handful of local news sites, radio reports, and even the national Fox News site:

So I guess I’m officially a video journalist now.