The job is reliable. You work in a clean office, and mostly you get paid to sit at a computer and type things. There are even a few nice benefits like accrued vacation and dental. You’re living the dream, right?
Wrong.
The signs are there, there’s no use denying them any more. Here are 22 signs you are desperate to quit your office job and become a homesteader.
1. You run the world’s tiniest farmers market. Out of your cubicle.
2. “Picking up chicks” means something totally different to you than it does to the 20 year old marketing intern with the greasy hair.
3. Everyone in the office is passionate about byflow conversion and you’re like, “check out the germination rate of these peppers!”
4. The entire office break-room smells like kimchi. It’s your fault, and you aren’t Korean.
5. You don’t understand why Carhartts and Muck Boots aren’t appropriate for Casual Friday.
6. During pointless conference calls you browse seed catalogs. During virtual staff meetings you browse seed catalogs. On hold to IT to reset your password, you browse seed catalogs. During mandatory compliance trainings, you browse seed catalogs. During new project stack sessions, you browse seed catalogs.
7. You bring your dairy goat kids with you to the office and bottle feed them in the Mother’s Room.
8. You openly mock your co-workers who play FarmVille on Facebook. Frickin’ tourists.
9. You put in for a week of vacation to repair your mini-tractor and actually enjoyed yourself.
10. While peer-interviewing a potential new hire, you grill him for a firm commitment on his stance vis-a-vis determinate vs. indeterminate tomatoes.
11. Your LinkedIn profile lists your professional title as “Senior Weeder, Back Garden.” You’re a software developer.
12. When you explain things like interactive visual analytics, you start, “Suppose you have two dairy cows…”
13. There’s an office crisis. Your coworker complains, “everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off!” and you respond, dead serious, “No they aren’t. Less flapping and squirting here.”
14. You stopped caring about the manure on your good office shoes 6 months ago, and the people in the elevator give you funny looks.
15. You bring your lunch in a mason jar. You keep the pens on your desk in a mason jar. You keep change for the vending machine in a mason jar. You keep business cards in a mason jar. You keep USB drives in a mason jar. You keep backup ethernet cables in a mason jar. You tried to keep your tablet, phone and charger in a mason jar but it didn’t fit, so you brought in a wooden harvesting basket.
16. Other people bring in donuts on Friday. You bring in growlers of homebrew, and upper management is still deliberating how to react.
17. When you took this job, you did so in part because it was only 5 minutes away from the local grange.
18. Co-workers know which boring commuter car is yours because of the bale of straw in the back seat.
19. You use the giant white board in the fish-bowl conference room to bubble sketch your plans for an off-grid homestead. People mistake it for the new highly redundant data center architecture and you get a raise.
20. You have a nice little side hustle selling free-range eggs to your co-workers for $8 a dozen, and this still doesn’t cover the cost of your chicken feed.
21. You’ve shifted from an 8 am to 5 pm shift to a 4 am to 1 pm shift. You’re up at dawn to feed the animals anyway, and wrapping up early gives you more opportunity to work on fencing while it’s still light out.
22. You know all about bullshit, and you see more of it in 20 minutes of office politics than on a 20,000 head cattle ranch.
7
Oh Erica.. I’m in bed with an evil fever and this has made me feel SO much better.. I laughed, choked and then had a coughing fit.. bless you.
I just want you to know this made my day. I just spent the past ten minutes sitting here in my cube trying to get out my frustrations by writing a letter to myself about how much I hate what I am working on right now. Just reading the title made me laugh! Perfect post for today. 🙂
If you had written this post 5 years ago, it would have been about me. I DID quit my job and love my country life! No regrets!
This is so true.
Especially about the mason jars. And the bubble sketching of the off-the-grid home. Ye gods. O.O
I think you were identifying me! I love this! Especially the part about not caring if there is manure on my work shoes anymore!
The dairy goat kids one delights me!
I’m the bale of straw in the boot girl. I also tried to collect food scraps from the office kitchen but it never worked out. People just kept putting their biodegradables in the bin of all places!
Yeah, this is me.
I did just put in my notice for my day job. Only about half apply to me. I haven’t canned in 2 years and our larder is running low. I’m contemplating losing all the grass in the backyard because my youngest is 16 and the house across the street where my mom used to do the bulk of the gardening sold and the new owners are not interested in gardening. I’m hoping we can pick their 5 fruit tree and keep the fruit.
This is a great post! I think mine would be more aptly titled “22 signs you’re desperate to stop renting and buy a house to become a homesteader”! One day soon, I hope. Until then, I’ll have to keep making due with my container gardens and incredibly limited storage space.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I would add to the list–you are in a cubicle and you are breathing. Doesn’t that automatically mean you’re desperate to quit your office job?
#kiddingnotkidding
This post is totally accurate! I use my office computer to make elaborate garden plans on the Farmers Almanac Garden Planner. I have the next 5 years worth of fruit trees mapped out.
Oh yes. All 22. Only that the office is an hour south, and the 10+ hours a week in the car are a big factor too.
Loved them all and identified with quite a few before I left the evil cubicles (and one of the tiniest basement of the library closet..er offices) behind a few years ago. Thanks to all the canning last season we’ve not started since both my husband and I have been sick the last month. Never tasted anything so good as our apple pear sauce this morning with homemade yoghurt. We still have plenty and are anticipating the “eat from the larder challenge” again this year. Keep up the inspiration!
Hi Erica, This is not related to your post, But I noticed your irrigation system and I was wondering if you could do a post on that. I have raised beds and would love to set up something permanent, but I’m a scaredy cat.
P.S. All your dreams will come true if you do.
🙂
Susan
I picked my husband up from work yesterday with chicken feed in the trunk and a bale of straw in the backseat….so YEAH, I’m right there with you.
Yep. That is exactly right.
23. Your coworkers come to you with questions about the bees in their brother-in-law’s neighbor’s sister’s yard.
Also, Farmville can go straight to hell. I may have been guilty of more than one not-so-under my breath rant about how it sets up unrealistic expectations about what goes into growing food. And also about what an *enormous* waste of time and brain space the “game” is. Ugh.
This is good! Thanks for the laugh 🙂 I can relate to…well…all of these! Except I’m still working an office job, though mine is pretty sweet. Non-Profit, home office, I set my own hours. Though I don’t work 4-1, 5-3 is pretty close and so much more conducive to the homestead life!
So hilarious! You hit the nail on the head with this post. I remember back when I had my ‘cubicle job’ I had raw milk delivered weekly to the office. In my eyes, this gallon of raw milk was pure gold. My coworkers kept informing me a grocery store was right down the road….. 🙂
Katie
Ditto on divulging the irrigation ingenuity 😉
Love this!
This was me in 2013… Quit my job, moved to Canada, now living on 106 acre farm homesteading.
Thanks for the laugh.
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