Actor Hamza Haq had always liked performing. But it was his first job, while he was still a university student, that sealed his fate. “I sat in an office and looked at Excel documents all day,” he recalls. “They gave me 40 pages of information about payroll and they said, ‘I need you to consolidate this and compile an Excel spreadsheet.’”
Haq was working for the cargo security unit at the Canadian border service agency in his adopted country. “I did the job in about two-and-a-half weeks, and they said that was actually a six-month-long project. So I told my superiors I needed an office to pray in, so they gave me a corner office ... so having a corner office, I closed the blinds and slept all day. I felt so bad. I was surrounded by people who were counting down the years to retirement,” he says.
“I felt like I was working in my grave.... Those people have a great work-life balance. I don’t have a great work-life balance. I work all the time and that’s to the detriment to those I love, but if I wouldn’t be doing it I wouldn’t feel as fulfilled as I do now.”
