Today’s featured picture, should you be wondering, is of a trail to the beach at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. I was just perusing some random files in my OneDrive folders and I liked it. I think I’ll just start doing that – using random shots – from now on.
Anyway, this morning is what I’d call one of the perfect 7 days that Georgia has each year. I used to say that we had 6 perfect days, but I decided recently to increase that to a full week. Not for any particular reason, but it’s probably close. There are usually 4 or 5 such perfect days in the autumn and 1 or 2 in the early spring. The rest of the year is either ungodly hot, ungodly wet, or both. This morning, though….it’s in the high 50s, there’s a luscious breeze blowing out of the south, the humidity is very low, and the leaves in my back yard have finally turned gold. I have the weirdest tree back there. I think it’s a Beech, and it stays green forever. And then, overnight, it seems, it goes gold. It will stay that color until January or so, and then – again, overnight – all of the leaves will fall off and it’ll be dead until summer, when it instantly becomes covered in thick green leaves. Just a strange tree.
So I’ve got the living room window open and the boys are loving life, sitting as close to the screen as they can without actually pushing it out of its frame, and smelling all that neat stuff that only cats can smell.
The job search continues for me. I’ve been rejected so far by AT&T (two or three times), Macy’s (once), GE (twice), NCR (once), and I think by somebody else that I can’t remember. I have resumes out to AT&T (several), OFS (a job that, if the dorks would just read my resume, they’d break their legs running to get me), RaceTrac (HQ – two possible jobs), and nice lady recruiter in Columbia, SC, has been hounding me for the last two days. I told her to leave me alone until I’ve exhausted my Atlanta options. Oh, and I’ve got a resume in Huntsville, AL, too. Private K-12 needs a support dude. I think that’d be fun.
My boss called me the other day and said that a friend of his is thinking about back-filling at job at AT&T, and he’s going to pass my name along. That’d be cool because I’d keep my years in service and current salary (which I’m not going to get if I leave the company), but it would also kinda suck because the job is for an outage call coordinator….which means that my job would be to sit on outage calls and yell at people in order to make them fix the outage. On the plus side, I’d get to work from home. Also on the plus side, it’d give me more management experience. On the minus side….come on…if you know me at all, you know that I don’t get in people’s faces. I fix the problems for them. In fact, that personality quirk bit me on the ass last week during my second interview for a sysadmin job at GE. The interviewer asked me why I haven’t advanced further up the ladder, considering my experience. I told him the truth: I don’t want direct reports. I don’t want to be a team lead. I like being given a problem and told to solve it.
He was looking for a team lead. Even told me that in the follow-up rejection call. “We really like your experience, but we want somebody to run the show.” I thanked him and told him to keep me in mind when they need tuba players and not trumpet soloists. He laughed and said that he would. All in all, a pretty pleasant rejection.
I’m also considering applying for a job as the assistant manager at an AT&T retail store – a job that is two salary grades below my own and would just barely pay the bills. Why would I do this? A number of reasons, actually. One, I’d keep my years in services. This is actually important to me, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m only three years away from being able to take an early retirement. Two, there’s nowhere for me to go in my current career path except into people management, and I have no experience with that. If I’m going to have to make that plunge eventually, I think it’d be good for me to actually get some experience as a manager – and what less stressful learning could I get than as an entry-level assistant manager? Three, I think I’d be damned good at it, given that I’m still a geek who likes to play with all the new toys, that (this is actually true) I’m extremely organized, that I like crunching numbers and making charts, and that (this is also true) I have phenomenal people skills in a work environment….said skills do not apply to social environments, where I can be kind of a dick, truth be told. I’m also free to apply for that job and to turn it down if it’s offered to me without losing my severance package (because it’s a step down, I’m not obligated to accept an offer). So I’m working on a cover letter for that gig, meant to convince the hiring manager that I’m not overqualified and that I’m not just flailing away trying to stay at AT&T, but that I’m truly interested in learning in order to maybe start a second career in my doddering years.
In a nutshell, no job yet, but I’m not defeated. I will admit that my smoke intake has increased markedly in the last couple of weeks, and I really need to chill out as far as that goes. Stress level is indeed high, but I’m trying to keep it under control.
What else what else….?
Oh! In between applying for jobs and avoiding all actual work in the office, I’ve been trying to learn more about Bootstrap, which is a CSS framework for mobile-first websites. Why? Because it’s cool. So there.
As a beginner project, I’ve decided to make a mileage/gasoline tracker for myself, rather than going back to one of the myriad apps that do the same thing. If you want to watch my progress, you can do so by looking at migration.theuffp.com/mileage. It’ll open in a regular browser. More importantly, if you open it on your phone, it should fit on the screen perfectly, thanks to Bootstrap. As of today, it does absolutely nothing. You can enter numbers and click buttons to your hearts’ content, and nothing will happen. Next week, however, I hope to start filling in the fun stuff that actually writes and reads data and displays graphs. Then I’ll have to add some security to it. Then I’ll be happy to set up accounts for anybody who wants to use it – and I’ll charge you.
Career #3 maybe?
In the “spending money I shouldn’t spend right now” category, I bought Battlefield 1 the other day. It’s a video game. First-person shooter of World War I. Having already beaten up the Japanese and Germans in two separate WWII games, and the Russians in a Cold War game, I’ve decided to go old-school and kick some WWI butt. Unfortunately, I need to get a video driver update before the game will work for me on my Surface Book. Hoping to do that later today, but I’m being very careful. All I need at this point is to break the graphics on my main computer….
And that, friends and family, is all the news that I can think to print. Maybe next week I’ll have something better. If not, I’ll try to just ramble on again anyway. After nearly 50 years of doing it, the act of writing (or typing) is still a very calming experience for me. I spend more on pens and notebooks than anyone I know. And then I leave them at my desk and type everything that I thought I was going to write. Weird.
Almost as weird as that stupid Beech tree.