When it came to doing delivering this story about a co-worker or at least someone who works professionally in relation to my work / future, I initially had a struggle think who to interview due to me being a contractor and it being a more “lonely job”, thankfully throughout the years in my field I’ve kept my circle open and reached out to an old friend, “Feddy” and after interviewing him I realised that he focused a lot on his beginning struggles which I didn’t think were right to share and didn’t match my mood that I initially wanted to portray in my presentation (even though he gave permission to share).
I then came to my next roadblock which was who to go to next, thankfully I came across a tweet from another friend in the little community of contractors we have, Tory, and asked him if he’d like to be interviewed and he said yes immediately which was great to hear and we pumped out a great interview that was a completely different take to how I thought other people in my field went about their work and business.
Out of the many presentations I’ve had to do this semester, this one was a lot more fun and relaxing to do because of the passion I have for my job and how interested I am in sharing experiences both Tory and I have gone through with others about the job as there isn’t much of a spotlight on what contractors like us do.
I would say my presentation did succeed in doing exactly that, I was asked many question about the career and which I was happy to share about but something I realized was eventually that the career I was talking about was more interesting than the interview itself and sadly began to overshine Tory and his story, thankfully Wren brought it back a few times with questions about Tory and my Club of Life which was good due to the presentation being about Tory and sharing his story rather than mine.
Something I realised upon reflection was that my mates in the same field as me all are in similar sections of my Club of Life, no matter how long I’ve known them for. The way I explained my circle of “co-workers” in my working sphere is like they are an old high school friend, who wasn’t really in your “crew” but you were friendly with and maybe had a couple classes with, and anytime you’d see them at the pub or some event you’d be fairly friendly. It seems as though whether I met them this year or back in 2019 there’s a similar “mate-ship” with each person which I believe to to do with the fact that we all generally do the same work ( even though the content we curate is completely different most of the time).
A great thing that came from this interview and presentation is that it re-kindled my desire to do more when it came to my work and try some new storytelling methods in my future projects. It also reignited the “mate-ship” Tory and I have and opened a place where we now converse a lot more about our work and get each other’s opinions on certain way we go about projects and help each other out in the space that we are in.
Reflecting on this whole presentation has made me think more about the people I have crossed in my career in working in the Social and Digital Media world and made me rethink how I approach the overall wellbeing of the people in the same or similar niche of work and made me want to keep a watchful eye out on the industry.
James Mackay - Portfolio 