Monthly Archives: December 2018

Christmas Vacation

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Well, there’s not a lot going on these days, but I thought I should update this thing anyway. I got the 24th-26th off from work (today being the 26th, of course), and I really haven’t done a thing in the last 5 days. Watched a bit of football on Saturday and sat at home watching television from Sunday until today. I did go over to Jenny’s place for dinner with her and her dad last night, which was nice. Some sort of a crabmeat casserole and some scallops, and a bit of catching up with Herb, who’s having more trouble getting out of a chair than he used to – and he’s not as light as he thinks he might be; I can attest to that having helped him up a few times. As he said when I was helping him into the car, “It’s amazing how fast your strength goes, and how much you don’t even realize you used to use it,” to do things like get into a car. Speaking of Herb and cars, Jenny and I are going to try to get his started and sold on Saturday. He’s also been talking to a realtor, so I guess he’s finally letting go of the house in Dunwoody.

Found out from my boss sometime last week that I’ll be getting a $750 bonus in my next paycheck, which is nice. Also getting a 4% raise starting with the January checks. Still nowhere near what I was making a couple of years ago (example: my last bonus at AT&T was just a bit over $9,000), but it’s a nice gesture and I do appreciate it. Got to give almost all of my direct reports raises for next year, too, which was great. The X-company just doesn’t pay their level 1 employees enough – which is probably why we can’t keep the good ones.

The photo for this post, should you be wondering, is of my buddy Brett during a trip we took to Huckleberry Knob in, I think, Tennessee, in July of 2009. I was going through some old hard drives today and found a bunch of old photos. Spent quite a bit of time reminiscing about everything from football games to camping trips to band concerts. It’s hard to believe how much time I spent with a camera in front of my face for the first 15 years of this century. Maybe I’ll pack one of the Canons the next time I go camping.

I toyed with the idea of going in to the office today to play around with a script that I’m trying to write for our infrastructure team, but that idea lost its luster over the last couple of hours, and now I’m thinking more about getting my hair cut and going to play trivia in a bar and watch whatever sports are on today. I just don’t feel like coding – or sitting in the office – before tomorrow.

And now I’ll dig into one of those old hard drives a bit more and see what other interesting things I can find. Sounds like a good way to waste a morning.

End-of-the-year Crunch

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Yes, indeed.  The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month.  There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.

I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend.  Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today.  Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.

As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering).  So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.

The X-company Christmas party was last Monday.  I did not attend.  Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar.  Not to worry, though.  The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday.  This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping.  From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700.  I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.

The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun.  After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event.  I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform.  That takes place in, I think, May.

It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat.  Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it.  Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.

Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week.  The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board.  First time that’s happened in about 30 years.  Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it.  Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year.  It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.  

I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems.  I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while.  It’s working pretty well.

And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now.  The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month.  I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot.  See how rustic I am!

a terrible horrible very bad day

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Note: I found this in my “drafts” folder today.  I’m assuming that it’s from somewhere in 2015, when I was dating Amy from Waukegan.

Monday was driving day.  The return to Atlanta from Waukegan.  It began at about 4:30 AM – and I should’ve just stayed in bed.

Remember when truck drivers were among the best drivers on the road?  Yeah, well, they’re not anymore.  I started to notice this probably 10 years ago, and it just seems to be getting worse with time. With that in mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I came to a less-than-screeching halt 90 minutes after I set out on my trip Monday morning.  Feeling good about things after making it through downtown Chicago without any significant slowdowns, I found myself basically sitting still on I-94, in the rain, for the better part of two hours – caught in the backup created by three trucks that had somehow managed to tangle with each other on I-80, some 5 miles down the road from me.

After finally getting past the scene of the accident, I spent the next 13 hours in basically non-stop rain, fog,  and the mist kicked up by trucks whose drivers insisted upon driving next to other trucks, blocking both lanes and throwing up walls of water behind them.  I got a bit of a break just south of Nashville, when the rain stopped and, briefly, the sun came out.  By the time I approached the mountains north of Chattanooga, however, Mother Nature had thrown down the gauntlet.  The rain increased steadily for the remainder of the trip, which ended at around 8:00 Monday night.  By then, my neck and shoulders were in agony from the hunched-forward attitude that I’d been holding in the car for the majority of the day.  It’s now two days later, and I could still use a massage.

I did make it home, however – managed to take just over 5600 pictures during the trip (the GoPro was set to snap one every 10 seconds) – and yesterday was back to the grind.  It’s amazing how I can miss two days of work (three if you count the few people who go in to waste time on Saturdays) and end up with over 400 emails to go through upon my return.  I spent a couple of hours trying to pay attention to them yesterday before figuratively throwing up my hands and deleting the whole lot of them.  Probably not the most prudent thing to do, but I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it anymore.  If there was anything in there that was actually worth reading, I’m sure it will be resent about 40 more times before I need to actually pay attention.

Spent the rest of the day dealing with obstinate workstations and working on some new code ideas.

After work, I went to a brass band rehearsal – which was nice.

There were no truck drivers there.

TWD

Back to the Grind

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So I did make it back from Michigan at just about midnight on November 16th.  It was a white-knuckle drive for the first few hours, as snow had been falling for most of Thursday night and plows had not been sent out by the time I left the cabin.  75 south comprised a couple of tire tracks that everyone more or less stayed in, with the exception of the random idiot who jumped into the left lane to try to pass everyone – without the benefit of any road markings at all.  I saw a number of cars that had spun off of the road and laughed a bit at all of them.

By the time I got back down to Toledo, the snow was pretty much gone, but it was bitterly cold whenever I had to stop for gasoline.  The Subaru did a great job overall.

Had a Thanksgiving dinner with Jenny, her neighbor, and Herb at Herb’s assisted living place on Saturday.  The food was good and the company was pleasant and I think everyone had a good time.  I also scored one of Herb’s old office chairs – we’d taken it to him, but because it has wheels, it’s not a good idea for him to try to use it – and I’m sitting in it as I type this.  I’ve never had a decent office chair at home, which is the main reason that I don’t take advantage of the fact that I could work at home a couple of days each week if I choose to.  I may choose to in 2019.

The next week, which contained Thanksgiving, was a short one at work.  We got Thursday and Friday off and I spent those two days recovering from the drive back – sleeping a lot, doing laundry, cleaning out the car, watching football.  Jenny and I had tentative plans to sell Herb’s car last Saturday, but they fell through so I spent the weekend watching more football, getting more sleep, doing more laundry.  Then it was back to work for a full week, which was not pleasant.

We had system outages on Monday and Tuesday – raised everyone’s blood pressures – and my problem employee was AWOL on Wednesday.  I sent him a number of texts and tried to call – no response until very early Thursday morning, when he sent a text to me to tell me that he had to take his kid to the hospital, that he’d tried to email me and my boss, but the email was stuck in the outbox, and that he didn’t have his phone with him.  Since he was supposed to be working at home all week – the result of a dead car, which he was to replace on Friday – I stewed a bit on Thursday before letting him know that I got his text and he really needs to confirm that his messages are received when he sends them to me.  On Friday, he sent me an instant message that he had to clock out at 1:00 in order to get a new car, which he had to do on Friday or it wouldn’t be done until Monday.

That kinda tore it.  On Monday, he and I and my boss and and HR rep will be meeting first thing in the morning, and he’ll be getting official written notice from me that he is not to miss any more days or he’s looking at getting fired.  I didn’t want to go there.  I’m a laid-back boss.  I’m also not a good guy to screw with on a regular basis.

So I’ve got that to look forward to tomorrow….

Was good to get back to the band last Tuesday night.  We’re rehearsing for a Christmas concert on the 18th (I think), and playing some good stuff.  My chops were a bit rusty after having three weeks off, but I acquitted myself well, I think.  Looking forward to the concert.

Yesterday, I found 14 forms of identification and drove over to the DMV (in the pouring rain) to get my license renewed.  I was worried that I might have to take an eye test (probably would’ve failed without my reading glasses), but everything went smoothly and I managed to get everything taken care of in under two hours.  Got my temporary replacement and should have the new license in a month or so.  So that’s out of the way.  I also paid my car insurance this week – no more of that until June.  Last thing I need to do with the car before 1/1 is get the registration renewed, but I can do that online.

I might make it through this year after all – two years at the X company.  Hard to believe.  I’ve pretty much settled into the salary.  Still miss the old one, but I can afford everything on what I make now and even splurge every now and then.  I’m kind of resigned to the fact that I hit my peak in 2016 and I’ll probably never make it back there, salary-wise, but I’m moving on and just trying to learn how to be an effective manager of people.  Got a nice boost from my boss on LinkedIn last week – he sent me a recommendation for my profile, which was completely unexpected and very much appreciated, and made me feel like I might just be making a good impression in my new position.  Small victories.

And so we’re all caught up.  Should you be wondering, the photo at the top of this entry was taken on the Thursday afternoon before I left Cheboygan.  The sun was on its way down, the wind had picked up, and a storm was just starting to make an appearance over the lake.  It was incredibly cold and gorgeous and I just kept running out into it to experience it, then running back to the cabin to get warm.  All in all, a great way to spend an afternoon.