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July/August 2009
Halifax's Coolest Jobs
by Erica Butler
Business Voice talks to a brewmaster, a golf pro, a comic book store owner, a forensic technician and a video game designer to find out if their jobs are really as cool as they sound. Some people have all the luck. When your work is a game, then you’re essentially playing all day, right? Not exactly.
“I don’t have time to play,” says Ed Hanczaryk, golf pro and owner of Awareness Golf School. Five-days-a-week, Hanczaryk works with students of all ages, giving 10 to 12 lessons a day, either outside on the links or at his indoor training facility in Burnside.
“Truth be known,” Hanczaryk says, “the winter is my busiest time. People who are committed and really want to improve do it year round.”
After a week of teaching, Hanczaryk spends another day keeping his business running: updating the website, doing paperwork and planning for the future. Throw in a day of rest and family time, and there’s not much room to play the game that Hanczaryk has devoted his career to.
“I played 10 times last year. I know I could play more, but when I’m playing I’m not teaching or coaching and I have to earn a living. I’m not a playing professional, I’m a teaching professional.”
But working as a teacher hasn’t dampened Hanczaryk’s original love for the game. If anything, the challenges and rewards of teaching seem to work symbiotically with his passion for golf.
“I love the psychological side of the game, the mental toughness and focus. What is that? How do you cultivate it? That’s the challenge.”
When it comes down to it, the only down side to being a golf pro and small business owner comes from, well, being a small business owner. Paperwork isn’t usually high on anyone’s list, but when it’s pitted against coaching some of Nova Scotia’s top junior golfers, you know it’s going to rate extra low.
Hanczaryk says his least favourite part of the job is the administrative stuff around teaching. Cal Johnston can relate. While he’s doing the paperwork associated with running his comic book shop, Strange Adventures, he knows he could instead be catching up on the storyline of a forgotten favourite comic series, or chatting with some of his regulars about their favourite characters or artists. Luckily for Johnston, both of these things are in his job description. Running a retail business means knowing your product well and, in the case of a comic book shop, that means reading a lot of comics.
“I get to come home a couple days a week and bring a stack of comics and tell my wife I have a lot of work to do,” Johnston says. “So it’s pretty good.”
It also seems like owning a comic book shop would be a perfect opportunity to indulge one’s collector instincts, but Johnston says no.
“You’ve got to get rid of that,” he says. “I do get to buy things I’ve always wanted, but I also have to sell them.”
Johnston does admit, though, he enjoys even the fleeting ownership of some highly prized comics, such as the very first Spiderman published in 1962.
“A lot of people have read the story, but how many times are you going to get the chance to read that actual comic, see the ads, smell the paper and read the letters to the editor?”
And it’s all in a day’s work at the comic shop, where quality control counts.
“You’ve got to read it,” Johnston says, “to make sure all the pages are there.”
Like a lot of the cultural industries, the comics world is small, which means another fringe benefit of being involved is you may get to meet some of your heroes. Not Batman per se, but perhaps Darwyn Cooke, the award-winning artist who sometimes draws the caped crusader, or other award-winning local creators, such as Steve McNiven or Faith Erin Hicks.
“You see their work, then you get to meet them,” Johnston says. “You see how stories get put together. It’s really interesting.”
One of the newest cultural industries with a foothold in Halifax is video game creation. Keith Blyth works as a game designer for HB Studios out of Halifax and Lunenburg. A game designer’s role can vary from company to company, but generally they’re in charge of designing the mechanics of the game, including user interaction. Designers work collaboratively with a large team of people, including 3-D artists, programmers, graphic artists and sound artists.
“I sometimes refer to my job as being a non-job because it’s very hard to describe what it is,” Blyth says. “I sit there and I make the game good.”
As you might hope and imagine, being a game designer involves its share of research. And by research, of course, we mean playing video games. HB Studios has a large games room complete with a game library for employees to keep abreast of the latest in the industry. But it isn’t all playtime, Blyth says.
“I spent a lot of last week staring at Excel spreadsheets, tweaking small numbers, saying, ‘If I move this certain slide, will the game be more fun?’”
Blyth first got into the games industry via another cool sounding job, video game tester.
“Yes,” Blyth says, “you’re playing video games eight hours a day, which does sound great. But it’s the same video game, eight hours a day, six months at a time.”
By contrast, as a designer, Blyth will work on different projects and also different aspects of the same project.
“Each day is different,” Blyth says. “It really is a fun job.”
Pop culture presence can really up the cool factor of any job and the proliferation of crime lab TV series means that one of Halifax’s coolest jobs these days is Forensic Identification Technician, or as they’re known around the shop, idents.
The nickname is only one of many differences between a real life ‘ident’ and a fictional television ‘CSI’. For one, they don’t all dress like that. For another, Halifax police idents are more police than they are scientists. Most idents have served for 10 to 12 years as regular cops before getting trained in forensic identification. And the Halifax forensics lab isn’t filled with microscopes. DNA evidence is sent away to a one of five major crime labs in Canada, where people with masters degrees and PhDs run the tests. And here’s a shocker: while TV CSIs get their DNA results back after the commercial break, it can take real idents a heck of a lot longer.
“If I go to a break and enter and swab for blood, the result could take about six months to come back,” says Sandy Johnston, of Halifax, Regional Police’s forensic identification team. But there’s still cool stuff in the daily work of an ident. Dusting for fingerprints is a regular event and there are even some contraptions at the local lab to help the process, like a superglue fuming tank and chemicals that can find fingerprints on a piece of paper. Just like on TV, photography is a big part of the job.
Unfortunately, so is attending the occasional autopsy.
“You’ve got to not mind dealing with autopsies and bodies,” Johnston says. “You might wonder if there’s something wrong with me if I’m not bothered by that. I see myself as sort of the voice for the victim. Our job is to figure out what happened to them. So you can’t be overwhelmed by what you’re seeing. You have to see the evidence, not the blood.”
Science doesn’t only play into cool police work, it’s also the basis of another cool Halifax job: brewmaster. Part chemist and part artisan, brewmasters such as Propellor’s Don Harms oversee all aspects of beer making, from brewing to fermentation to filtration to packaging.
The brewmaster is the chef, the production manager and the R&D team in a brewery. Research does involve some beer drinking, of course, but in his average day’s work, Harms never imbibes more than a single bottle’s worth of brew. And much of that is beer in the making. Part of mastering the brew is knowing what it should taste like at every stage of the process.
“There aren’t too may people who can drink partially fermented beer at 7 a.m.,” jokes Harms. And there’s not a lot of room for trial and error in a microbrewery.
“Being small, you have to get it right the first time,” Harms says. “I can’t brew up a 30 barrel test batch to see how it’s going to be.” What Harms appreciates most about his job is the variety it offers. “It’s never boring,” Harms says. “In 20 years of brewing, I’ve never woken up and dreaded going to work.”
And then there’s the satisfaction of the finished product.
“I take great pride in knowing we make quality beer right here in Halifax,” Harms says. “Halifax is a good beer drinking town. You get instant gratification when you see people drinking and enjoying your product.”
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