Tag Archives: Life

A Necessary Saturday

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Today’s featured image was taken three years ago.  The boys were just about 4 months old, Boo was still the biggest critter in the camp, my renter was a large and bald ex-bouncer, and I was probably mentally ready to head to Canada for a couple of weeks.  Today, Boo is dwarfed by her little brothers, my renter is a relatively petite customer service manager, and I’m still mentally ready to head out anywhere – although that’s not going to happen for quite some time.

Got kind of a punch in the gut last week when I applied for an Onboarding Specialist position that’s opening up at The X Company.  Informed my new boss of my intention to apply, he said fine – he’s been my boss for all of about two weeks, having just been promoted to the L1 lead position.  Did an interview with our talent scout, who is filtering applicants to send to the hiring manager.  I thought it went fairly well.  He asked all the usual questions, including what my boss would say that I did well and what my boss would say that I didn’t do so well.  I explained that I really didn’t know what my *new* boss would say, as I haven’t talked with him; but said that my previous boss, Joe – based solely on the (three) one-on-one meetings that I’ve had with him, since he and I have barely spoken since I started working – would probably say that I do a good job with my clients, consistently meet my metrics, have good communications skills, and generally know my shit.  As for what I need to work on, I really didn’t know and I said that.  Perhaps more consistency with the metrics, but judging on the daily stats that I get combined with his comments – written and verbal – in those three meetings, I really couldn’t think of anything that I needed to drastically improve.  I know I’m doing a good job, and I told the guy that.  Said, fairly bluntly, that I understand that I’m new, but that this is stuff that I was doing close to 30 years ago, that I’m going to get better and better at it, and that I’m going to be bored to death with it within 6 months.  Also mentioned that I’d taken a 50% pay cut when I accepted the job.  Didn’t pull any punches, but was polite, positive, eager to learn new things and be more involved with customer planning, yada yada yada.

Got a fairly terse email the following day informing me that the interviewer had spoken with my bosses and they’d informed him that I really needed to improve, that my metrics were below par but getting better, and that the interview process could not proceed because “we’re only looking for people who meet and exceed expectations.”  I was mildly stunned.  Pulled up the daily stats and graphed them.  My metrics are solid.  At the top, in fact.   So I pulled up the records of my three meetings.  Scored 9/10 in my first one, 10/10 in the next two.  Got a bit pissed off, but decided to be cool.  Sent a nice note back to the interviewer and stated that I disagreed with the take on my performance, but that I understand that I’m new and I try not to take anything personally and it was nice talking with him, thanks, etc.

Two hours later, my new boss (Ben) sits down next to me, says, “Will you have a few minutes to talk today?”  I said I could talk right then.  So we go to a conference room and he begins his remarks by saying, “Joe and I never said anything to Neil about your metrics.  You’re doing fine.  Joe thought you might have an attitude problem because you haven’t been particularly friendly.”

I agreed with him on that point, particularly where Joe is concerned, explaining that I haven’t been overly friendly with Joe because I’ve had the feeling – from day one – that Joe actively dislikes me.  Ben said something along the lines of, “That’s understandable, and you’re not the first one to say it.”  I then explained again that it was all good.  I wasn’t going to worry about it.  If there were issues – perceived or real – then I’d just go back to taking care of my clients, which is what I’m paid to do.  Ben said he’d talk to Neil (the interviewer) and straighten things out, and I assumed that I was back in the running.

The next day, I got another email from Neil that said, “I hope that, after talking with Ben, you have a better understanding of what the problem is.”  So I wrote back and said, “Actually, I’m now more mystified than ever, but – again – I’m not going to worry about it.”

Two days pass, and we arrive at yesterday afternoon.  Joe called me into his office.  I’m like, “Oh crap.  Can we just let this thing go?” but I sit and ask what’s up.  He says that he heard back from Neil and that I said I was still not sure about how I’m underperforming; so I laid out the whole timeline for him (did not mention that I still think he dislikes me), and said for about the 15th time, “It’s okay.  I’m new to the job and the company.  I guess I’m trying to move too fast.  I just have seen no indication that I’m not performing as expected.  If I am, please tell me what I need to do to improve.”

And Joe says, “No, your metrics are great.  Your firms have nothing but good things to say about you.  You obviously are incredibly technically qualified.  Your communication is good – wish the other guys out there would document things like you do.  You pay attention to detail.  You’re doing great.  The thing is, we worry about your teamwork.  Some of the guys on the floor thought you came off as sort of condescending when you started here.”

And I’m like (in my head), “THAT’S what this is all about? Seriously?”  So I laid it out for Joe.  I came to work at The X Company after 17 years of being responsible for nearly every bit of infrastructure – phones, computers, televisions, signage, wall hangings, heaters, fuse boxes, coffee makers, you name it.  While I did work in a business casual atmosphere there, it is also a Fortune 50 company and there is certain level of professionalism that is expected.  Prior to working at BellSouth/AT&T, I was a contractor for three years and worked for some of the most respected companies on the planet.  And when I got to The X Company, I was thrown into the middle of a bunch of kids who spent their days playing ping-pong, talking about online gaming, and shooting rubber bands and nerf guns around the room.  The company took a day off to have a picnic and play kickball.  The dress code includes The X Company t-shirts and shorts.  Not to mention that I was doing my best to 1}Learn the applications that I’m supporting, and 2}Provide my clients with top-notch support.  So, yeah.  I probably did, and perhaps still do, come off as aloof and/or condescending at times.  My focus is and will be on my clients, and if the office that I’m sitting in is one step up from kindergarten, then call me the guy without team spirit.  I’m okay with that.  And oh, by the way, those guys are now coming to me for help with their own clients.

Joe got the message.

He and I then talked about upcoming projects (wherein people like me go to new clients and get them set up) and an opening for a project manager (who manages people like me who are going to new clients to get them set up), and he encouraged me to sign up for some of the former and to apply for the latter.

So after the gut punch, maybe there’s a glimmer of light.  We shall see.  At least Joe, and hopefully Ben – and maybe even Neil – now knows where I’m coming from.  I’ll shoot the nerf guns between 5:30 and 6:00, after I’ve shut off my phone and I’m winding down. The rest of the day, I’m focused on my clients.

In other news, I took a short trip up to the Pisgah National Forest (the Shining Rock Wilderness Area) over the Memorial Day weekend and spend a wonderful, restful, couple of days in the middle of nowhere along the Pigeon River.  Only had to hike in about two miles to get away from the day hikers.  I setup my tent and a tarp, drank some apple-crisp whisky and splashed in the river on Saturday; then slept like a dead man while a massive storm raged during Saturday night.  On the way up to the area, I passed the Davidson Creek campground in the national forest, and thought that it might be an alternative to my Lake Superior campground for later this year.

Looked it up online when I got home.  The 2nd and 3rd weeks in October are almost fully booked, and it’s $40/night!  I’m once again leaning towards going back to Pictured Rocks on Superior.  Yes, it’s a longer drive – but I know that I’ll be fairly alone, and I know that it’s a beautiful spot.   Actually, while talking with Joe about upcoming projects, I learned that there is one in Wisconsin and one in Michigan (I believe North Lake, MI, which would be incredible) coming up in late August.  Am considering trying for one of those with the idea of scheduling my vacation at the end of the on-site week, so that I could just leave and head to the lake, saving the company air fare and getting my lake jones taken care of in one fell swoop.

On the good news front, I spent this morning rolling coins and counting the paper money that I’ve been stuffing into a water jug over the last year.  You know the drill – you get home, you empty your pockets, and you save any money that’s in them.

I’ll be making a deposit of just over $2,700 this morning.

It’s going to be a nice vacation if I can ever get it scheduled.

 

Chillin’

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Today’s featured image was taken on this day one year ago, and is of the Little Santeetlah Creek in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest – one of my favorite places in the world for a quick getaway from city life.  My buddy Brett and I had actually planned to go up there a couple of weekends ago, but it was covered in snow, gates were closed, trees were down, and the roads were basically impassible.  We opted instead to hang out at Fires Creek in the Nantahala Wilderness for a one-night campout.  Bing tells me this about the JKMF:

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is an approximately 3,800-acre tract of publicly owned virgin forest in Graham County, North Carolina, named in memory of poet Joyce Kilmer, best known for his poem “Trees”. One of the largest contiguous tracts of old growth forest in the Eastern United States, the area is administered by the U. S. Forest Service.

Oddly enough, Kilmer himself was born, and lived most of his life, in New Jersey.  He was killed in France in WWI.  Why his name is attached to a forest in NC is somewhat of a mystery, excepting, of course, the reference to his “Trees” poem, of which I’m sure that everyone knows at least the first line.

Work was a bit more hectic than usual last week, largely due to the fact that I got another “primary” firm (meaning that I’m their primary consultant), and they’re brand new to The X Company.  McSoley, McCoy & Company is a small CPA firm in South Burlington, VT, and I’ve got to admit that I like taking care of them simply because of their location.  At this early stage, however, they’re pretty needy.  I’m told that it usually takes about 6 months for a new firm to settle into a cloud-based environment, and I’m hopeful that they get used to things a lot faster than that.  I’m spending a lot of time on the phone with them, and I’ve got 5 other primary firms that I’ve somewhat neglected since MMC on-boarded.  They’ve been fun to work with, however.  Nice people.

I tried to get some sleep yesterday – don’t have much time to do so during the week – but I still have things to do at home.  Managed to get a few loads of laundry done and to straighten up my bedroom.  Still need to mow the lawns, but storms rolled in yesterday afternoon and nixed any idea of working outside.  I should also mention that it was about 90 degrees and humid, so outdoor work would have been incredibly uncomfortable.  Took a 3.6-mile walk this morning in a steady drizzle, and the rain is predicted to continue for much of this week, so my lawns are going to be a major pain to mow by next weekend.  I’d hoped to maybe try the mountains again, but it looks like I’ll be stuck at home to mow and do other home-type things.  Still need to fix the toilet in my half-bath.  Been meaning to do that for about 8 months now….

Learned a couple of weeks ago that I will not be able to take a vacation in July, so Ahmic Lake appears to be out this year.  I’m trying to decide if I want to go back to Lake Superior in October (haven’t asked if I can have that time off yet…perhaps I should) or if I can find something acceptable that’s closer to home.  Basically, I don’t want much in a place, but there are some non-negotiables:

  1. It has to be cool, bordering on cold.
  2. It has to have plenty of tree cover.
  3. I have to be alone, or as close to it as possible.
  4. It has to have water into which I can immerse myself.  A decent-sized stream, a lake, an ocean.  No ponds.
  5. It has to have wind.
  6. It has to be secluded enough to allow me to take long walks in the trees.

Superior, of course, has all of those things and is currently at the top of my list.  The drive is the only problem.  Not that it’s boring (it’s beautiful for much of the way) or that it tires me out: It just cuts into my time in the woods.  Figure 1 or 2 days to make the trip each way, and my vacation takes a serious hit.  At AT&T, it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I mean, I got something like 38 days off every year.  At The X Company, I think I get 10.  I’d rather not lose 3-4 of them driving.

So I’m considering places along the Atlantic…North Carolina, Virginia, perhaps Georgia or SC (although I think it’d be too hot and too crowded in those states, not to mention the fact that the beaches in GA and SC have very little tree cover).  Have been looking into the other great lakes that would be closer – Michigan, Erie, Ontario – but I don’t know if they’ve got the tree cover that I’m looking for, either.

One idea that I’ve been pondering is to head to Vermont, somewhere along the Long Trail, and maybe talk The X Company into letting me have a couple of days “on the clock” visiting with McSoley, McCoy.  Not sure if that’d fly or not, but I’d be willing to float the idea if I can find a perfect camping spot in, say, the Northeast Kingdom.

“Why not just go to Joyce Kilmer,” you ask?  That is a possibility, of course.  The only problem with it is that hunters and rednecks abound in that area in the fall.  The “alone” part of my list is pretty important.

One other idea is Unicoi State Park in Georgia.  I’ve never spent much time there, but it’s in the mountains, it’s got a lake, it’s got trails, it’s got cover, and it’d be chilly in October.  Biggest drawback is that, in October, the leaf-peepers will be coming out of the woodwork.  It’s got some walk-in campsites, however, so I might be able to get away from the crowds.  Going to do some more research on the park.  If I could make it work, it’d be fantastic.  It’s only about 3 hours away, and it really is a beautiful park.

And I think that’s about it for now.  Still plugging away, still dreaming about a retirement life in the woods, still a bit pissed off at AT&T (I doubt that I’ll ever get over that, to be honest), but still trying to keep a positive attitude.  A few more years.  I can last a few more years.

TWD

In Praise of Waze

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As a rule, I like software.  Installing a new program – or even reinstalling old programs – has always been sort of a Christmas morning thing for me.  Building out a new computer and then deciding what software to install just gets me pumped up.  Outside of playing my horn, there’s not much I’d rather do than install (and then play with) software.

That being said, I rarely like a program so much that I’m willing to give it unsolicited props.  It’s not often that a computer program, much less an app on a phone, literally changes my life.  Microsoft Access did in the early 90s.  It provided a combination solution for my love of databases and my desire to write code and launched me on a career that, to some extent, continues to this day.  Kindle (or, more generally, any book-reading application) changed the way that I read books.  Sure, I generally have one or two paperbacks in the bathroom, but I’ve been carrying libraries on my PDA/phones since the late 90s, and whenever I have 5 or 10 minutes of down time, I open a book and read a few pages.  Never really did that before eBooks hit the scene.

And now there’s Waze, an app that I installed on my phone just over a week ago, after my commutes to and from work had begun to convince me – seriously – that I would have to quit my job before I had a stroke (or just a nervous breakdown).  I was complaining about my drive to one of the guys who was hired on the same day as I was, and he casually tossed out, “Just get Waze.”

I had to google the thing.  Thought it was spelled “Ways,” which would make sense for a mapping application.  Then I found it.  Read about it.  Installed it on my Windows phone.  And couldn’t get past the initial agreement screen because it was so poorly written.

Turns out the Google had purchased Waze a few years ago and had stopped supporting Windows phone.  But I was so intrigued by the idea of a crowd-sharing mapping program that I took my Android phone, which I had had fixed after it broke last year, but had never put back into service, up to the AT&T store and told them to make it a real phone again.

That’s right.  I abandoned Windows phone just so I could try this app.  And I made the right choice.

The first day that I used Waze to drive to work, it started me out in the “wrong” direction.  Literally had me turning left at the end of my road, away from work, instead of right.  But I thought to myself, “What the hell.  It’s going to take me an hour anyway.  I might as well see something new.”

Would you believe that I got to work in under 30 minutes?  Or that, except for the last 1/2 mile – which is always going to be gridlocked – I wasn’t stuck in traffic at all?  Or that I was regularly exceeding the speed limit, driving on little back roads that I didn’t even know existed?

I thought it was a fluke.  “Wonder what it’ll do to get me home,” I thought.  At 6:00 in the evening, after all, there’s NO WAY to get from Alpharetta to Duluth in under 75 minutes.

Waze got me home in under 40.  I was blown away.  I actually walked through the door of my house with a smile on my face.

So I used Waze for a few days going back and forth to work, and then decided to try it out on last weekend’s GBB tour through Alabama and Tennessee.  It worked okay.  Pretty much gave me the same directions as my Garmin, which is the go-to GPS for my long trips.

That is, it gave me the same directions until my trip home from Chattanooga last Sunday afternoon.  I’m cruising down 75 and Waze suddenly chirps at me “Standstill ahead.  Take exit blah blah and go WAAAAAY the hell out of your way.”

I paraphrase.

Since I didn’t have to be anywhere until Monday morning, I gave Waze the benefit of the doubt, and I took exit blah blah – which is the exit that I used to take when going camping in the middle of nowhere – and let it lead me home.  Which it did, again finding little roads that I never knew about.  I got home at about the time I’d expected to.

As it turned out, there was a major pile-up on 75, about 5 miles south of where I exited.  Had I continued to follow my Garmin, I would’ve been stuck in traffic for about two additional hours.  This little FREE app not only determined that my traffic was about to suck, but also figured out a way around it on the fly.  My Garmin would’ve eventually told me that traffic sucked (probably when it was too late to change course), and then would have waited for me to tell it to find a new route.

Waze also sends me updates about things on the route.  It will tell me, for example, “There’s heavy traffic 9 miles away on Kimball Bridge Road” when I leave my house.  This is a given.  There’s always heavy traffic on KBR.  But it will also tell me, “Be careful.  There’s road kill in your way in a mile.”  Or “Police radar in two miles.”  And it’ll put a little icon on my map telling me where the dead dog or the cop is.  It warns of cars parked on the shoulder, water in the road, school busses stopping…anything that a normal person would notice – because it’s normal people updating the thing.

And so I sincerely offer this blog post in praise of Waze.  It has definitely changed my drive, made me a happier person, and – possibly – lengthened my life.

Thank you, whoever invented this wonderful program.

Changes

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Today’s featured image is one of my desk at Digital Life one year ago today.  Ah, the innocence of rubber duckies, lightly-salted almonds, and not having a clue what was in store for me….

Or for Digital Life, for that matter.  I don’t think that, at least after the first year of my employment there, I ever made much of a secret of the fact that I thought upper management was taking a great idea at Digital Life and ruining it.  When I left Global Network Operations for the DL gig, I did so in large part because I thought I was getting in on the ground floor of a project that would actually make life better for a lot of people.  The buzzwords back then (2012?) were “Living In Place,” and I honestly believed that DL could change the way people live.

See, the big idea was home automation that could be monitored.  Monitored by oneself or by someone else.  So that, for instance, elderly parents could continue to live in their own home and their children or other designates could help to keep them safe.  Your 89-year-old mom leaves the iron turned on for 6 hours?  No problem – you can shut it off with your phone.  Fires, water leaks, gas leaks…all of those things that you want to know about would be detectable and actionable from anywhere in the world.  DL was literally almost called “Living in Place,” with the idea that you didn’t have to be at your home to run it.  You didn’t have to put the folks into assisted living.  You didn’t have to worry about your cats.  Nearly everything could be automated, and our platform was going to offer that automation and continually improve upon it.

Then the bigwigs got involved.  They saw that there was a very large portion of the American populace without home security systems.  They saw that ADT was making a truckload of money by playing to people’s fear.  And they decided that Digital Life was going offer some home automation, sure – but first and foremost, DL was going to be a home security system.  And not just ANY home security system, but one that was hopelessly understaffed, wildly overpriced, and pathetically devoid of anything approaching high quality or creativity.  Living in Place was secondary, as evidenced by the fact that new automation devices were not investigated or added to the list of supported devices.  Decent cameras.  Learning thermostats.  Third-party door locks.  Voice recognition modules.

You know….the kinds of things that Google is currently dominating the market with.

It was all about police, fire, and rescue.  Riding on the back of an antiquated system that was developed before digital switches.  Literally – software had to be developed to mimic physical switches so that cellular technology – which had damned near completely replaced landlines – would work.  And AT&T didn’t even take ownership of the software.  They farmed it out to a company that no one has ever heard of.

And for all of this mediocrity, they charged the customer significantly more than, say, ADT.

So I was among the first wave of DL employees to get the boot.  Got a text yesterday from the area manager of the call center that I supported.  He’s in the third wave.  Looking for a job now.  The call center will close on 4/28.  National sales will cease early this summer.  Digital Life, with all the promise it had, is or will be on the auction block.

And the sad part is that I doubt anyone will buy it.  That ship has sailed.  While AT&T dawdled and screwed around with home security, Google and a few others got serious about home automation and living in place.  And the little people – the middle managers and the front-line people who tried to make Digital Life a great thing, are now seen by other AT&T affiliates as (I quote the area manager) “bad meat.”  I experienced a bit of this myself, but thought maybe it was just me.  It wasn’t.  Those who are being laid off have virtually no chance of being picked up by other departments within AT&T.  A lot of long careers, like mine, are just going to end.

You can bet that the upper management people will not find themselves in that situation.

But back to my own life.  Just as I’d gotten used to getting up early, hitting the road, and beating the traffic in both directions, my hours got changed.  Rather than working from 7-3 with no lunch, I got put on a 9-6 shift.  Sure, I could make it 9-5 without a lunch; but honestly, what’s the point?  Beating the 6 o’clock traffic by leaving during the 5 o’clock traffic?  No difference.  My commute now – in both directions – sucks.

I’m also on the phone about 8 hours a day now.  The headset doesn’t come off.  I’m the secondary contact for one company and, as of yesterday, the primary for another.  I’m on the clock – and documenting it – just about every minute that I’m in the office.  There is no room for creativity and very little for curiosity.  A ticket is opened and my job is to close it as quickly and quietly as possible.

Yawn.  I’m still looking for/thinking about other things to do.

Had a crown fall out during the drive to work last week.  Naturally, right?  After my AT&T dental insurance is over and before my The X Company dental insurance kicks in.  And it was on Thursday morning, which meant that my dentist – who doesn’t work on Fridays – couldn’t see me until yesterday.  So I took an extra hour at lunch yesterday, went to said dentist, got the crown reattached, and paid $71 for the privilege.

Got back to the office and was handed my insurance card two hours later.  Figures, huh?

On the plus side, my dentist may call to have me fish some wiring in his house this weekend.  He recently got a new cable box, with HDMI only, and his house isn’t wired for it.   Guess what, Doc?  I make $150/hour for systems installation.

One good thing about the new hours, by the way, is that I can get decent walks in each morning.  Except for today, that is.  It’s raining pretty hard, and I’m just sitting in bed typing.  Or I was.  It’s 7:00 now, and I’ve got to hit the road pretty soon if I’m going to make it the 10 miles to the office by 9:00.

Laters, y’all!

Marching Forth

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So it’s been a month since I posted anything here.  Had to go back and read a few posts to see what’s happened.  In spite of the huge number of faithful followers, that’s really the reason I type into these things: so I can remind *myself* of what happens in my life.

The featured image for today, if I can ever get it edited enough to upload, is of the boys (Chamberlain and Joshua) being boys – a week after their first birthday.  I’d given them a couple of plastic tubes filled with catnip (or maybe Jenny gave them those), and they were having a blast with them.  I still stumble upon those toys occasionally, so I guess they still enjoy them today – a week past their third birthday.  It’s really hard to believe that it’s only been about two and a half years since they came home.  Seems like a lifetime ago.  I guess that, in many ways, it has been.

The job, while still failing to make me leap out of bed in eager anticipation, is becoming more of something that I do without actually despising it.  I’m closing 6-8 tickets a day, have actually started using the phone (instead of trying to do everything via email, which is incredibly difficult), and have settled into a quasi routine of getting up earlier (5:15), taking a short walk, forgoing any “rest time” in the morning, and hitting the road by 6:30.  That gets me to work at around 7:00 – traffic is just starting to ramp up at that time.  I’ve discovered that, for every 5 minutes that I dawdle, my commute time increases by 5 minutes.  So if I leave at 7:00, it takes an hour.

My 30-minute commute normally includes a stop at McD’s, where I get two biscuits and a cup of coffee.  One biscuit is eaten during the drive.  The other serves as my late-morning snack.  Lunch no longer occurs, though I’ll sometimes eat a pack of crackers at my desk in the afternoon.  By skipping lunch, I can leave the office between 3:00 and 3:30, making my drive home take anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes – much much much faster than I’d be able to do it if I were to leave at 4:00 or 5:00.

There are still things that bug me about the gig.  Oddly, the work itself is not one of them.  I’ve gotten along pretty well with the clients that I’ve helped, and I’m learning some of the quirks and tricks of working in a cloud-first environment.  The kids working there, though….it’s jarring at times.  True story: nearly everyone has their own Nerf gun, which shoots little Nerf darts; and at any given time, there are darts whizzing around the office.  This activity includes not only the level 1 consultants like myself, but also the managers, level 2’s, project people, engineers…I think the only three people who DON’T indulge in this behavior are the CEO, the receptionist, and myself – though I’ve been known to get ticked off and simply throw an errant dart back at a shooter by hand.

Turns out, I’m still a pretty good dart thrower.

For people who are out of Nerf bullets, there is also a huge ball of blue rubber bands.  I don’t know where this came from, but it’s literally bigger than a soccer ball, bounces like a super ball, and weighs about 30 pounds.  I’ve dribbled it a few times, and it’s like playing basketball with a medicine ball.

Lots of “balls” in that paragraph.  Please keep your tittering to a minimum.

At any rate, the children in the office regularly take rubber bands from the ball and shoot THEM around the office when they’re out of Nerfies.  At the end of each day, I dutifully collect the 8 or 9 bands that have managed to collect on and around my desk and return them to a central location.  To their credit, the other people in the office appear to pick up those toys on a daily basis and put them back on the mother ball.  It has not shrunk since the day I started.

Regarding the desk (and the phone): THAT’S another problem that I’m working through.  Not since the mid-90’s have I been stuck at a desk all day.  Starting with my consulting gig at Compaid, I’ve always been able to combine working at my computer with other activities, from crawling under desks (or floors) to climbing ladders to running cable to walking around doing physical inventories.  Sitting for so long at my advanced age has led to a few, shall we say, delicate annoyances.  To be a tad more indelicate….hemorrhoids and testicular zits.

Oh sure.  You have your laughs.  Just discount my suffering.

While I can’t completely get away from sitting at my workstation, I did buy a new set of wireless headphones yesterday that will at least allow me to stand up when I’m on the phone.  The headset that the company provided has about a three-foot cord that doesn’t allow much movement.  Most of the people in the office have opted, as have I, to purchase their own gaming headsets and gain some mobility.  I do not in any way fault the company for this.  Good headsets aren’t cheap, and The X Company provides a lot of perks that, frankly, I am not used to seeing.  Free drinks.  Free snacks.  And, as I pointed out earlier,   a pretty loose working schedule.  Seriously, though, I’ve got probably 20 years on the next-oldest person in the office, and my body can’t deal with sitting down for 8-9 hours at a stretch every damned day.  I do take a couple of 10-minute walks around the outside of the building each day, but that doesn’t really undo the damage that’s being done to my lower anatomy.

I did indeed receive my severance check from AT&T in mid-February, which was nice.  As expected, I got raped in taxes, but it came in in time for me to pay my mortgage and car payment, which I couldn’t have done with my first paycheck from The X Company.  Now having received my second, I should be back on track to be able to pay all of the bills going forward – having also reworked my budget.

Not eating lunches is helping.

Also helping is the fact that Mary (and Princess) completed their move in on Saturday (Feb 25th), and I’ve received her first month’s rent.  The first few days were a bit hectic.  Mary is a weepy thing and there were scheduling problems with her movers, so she was not a joy to be around.  Adding to the stress was the fact that, due to our schedules, we really couldn’t let the cats run around freely.  Princess was ensconced in the second guestroom for a couple of days while Mary moved things in and out.  I locked my guys in my room on Tuesday, with a bit of shelving covering the cat hole in my door, so that Princess could run around the house and, if she chose to, sniff noses with my kids while Mary and I were both at work.

Got a text from Mary in mid-afternoon Tuesday asking me if I’d been home, because all of the cats were running around the house.  Turns out that my three had managed to work together long enough to break from their shackles and escape.  No bloodshed that we could find.  Josh and Chamberlain have been getting along fine with Princess (who is TINY.  6 pounds soaking wet), but Boo still has reservations, as I assumed she would.  Princess herself appears to be the instigator of most of the stress.  I know it’s all new for her, but she’s a weird little thing.  She’ll let me pet her and purr and be a happy cat for about 30 seconds.  Then she’ll start hissing and taking swipes at me.  She appears to do the same thing with the boys – though they could care less.  Boo just avoids her.  Truth be told, I think Princess is grandstanding a bit.  When she thinks that no human is looking, she’s perfectly fine hanging out with J or C; but as soon as she catches one of us in the corner of her eye, she hisses and runs away from whichever cat has been hanging out with her.

She’ll get over it eventually, I’m sure.

On the music scene: I’ve got a concert with the Gwinnett Symphony Wind Orchestra this afternoon.  Not quite as ambitious as the four we had last year – I think Dr. Wubbenhorst is beginning to realize that he’s not directing a bunch of A-listers at this point – but some pretty nice stuff.  While not incredibly musically satisfying for me, it does give me a chance to dust of the tuba chops, which is nice.  Next weekend, the GBB will be performing at Kennesaw State’s Brass Blast for the third or fourth time.  That’s going to be a concert comprised of movie themes, and it should be pretty good.  The GBB is also finalizing plans for a mini-tour in May, during which we’ll be presenting concerts at Jacksonville State (Alabama), Huntsville, AL, and Chattanooga; and then we’ll return to Roswell, GA, for a ticketed event that, I think, closes out the season.  The board is considering taking the band to the Gettysburg Brass Festival in 2018, which would be a blast.

Always assuming that I can get time off from work, of course.

I’d hoped to go to the woods with Brett this weekend or next, having completely forgotten about the concerts.  Maybe we can do it in two weeks instead.  I really need some woods time.

Having received the severance check, and in anticipation of getting my final bonus check from AT&T sometime this month, I’ve re-opened my negotiations with my landscaper buddy, and he and his crew have started mauling the growth in the lower forty.  He came out last week and decimated a row of privet that has been the bane of my existence since buying the house, and within the next few weeks they’re also going to take down all but two trees back there, clear out all the brush, take down the two trees by my chimney (and the hideous little bush that I’ve always hated…I can’t remember what it’s called), and, later in the year, help me get grass growing in the lower forty again.  It should transform the place and I’m looking forward to getting it done.  At some point, after the initial tree harvesting is done, I’ll also get Chamblee Fence back there to replace the existing, decrepit, fence.  Not going to be cheap, but it’s got to be done and should more than pay for itself in increased property value should I ever get nerve enough to put the house on the market and hit the road.

Oh!  I also got a thing from AT&T last week about a pension fund that I didn’t know I had.  So there’s an extra $100K available to me at some point.  Herb thinks I should roll it, and my 401, into a Roth.  I’m like, “Do you really think I’m going to live long enough to take advantage of that?”

I guess I’ve probably bored everyone enough for one morning, and I think I covered pretty much everything of substance for the last month, so I’ll wrap things up here with a shout-out to the one who gave me life.  Yesterday marked 7 years since Mom moved on, and it was the first March 4th since 2010 that I actually didn’t think about it until I saw Facebook posts from Dianne and Dad.  It’s not that I don’t miss her – I do think about her fairly often, particularly when I’m feeling lonely or frustrated and just want somebody to cry to – but I’m sure she’d be happy that I’m far enough along to – nearly – pass that anniversary without thinking about it.

One thing I’ll always wonder, though: What would she have thought about Trump?  You and I might have to discuss that at some point, Dad.

Midwinter Update

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Mea culpa for not realizing that it’d been nearly two weeks since I put anything here….though I have realized in the last week that I should have done so.

The featured image for this post is of me at a game at VMI in (I think) 2014.  If memory serves, it marked the first game in Lexington, VA, since VMI returned to the conference after leaving for 10 years or so.  One of the cheerleaders took it for me – good kids, those.  I missed them more than the games themselves when I took last season off.

Anyway, the job search came (more or less) to an end last week, when I accepted an offer to join The X Company, an an Alpharetta-based cloud services company for CPA firms.  I’m not going to pretend that this is my dream job, but it has good and bad points.  It’s a small company (just over 100 employees), which has been around since 2002, has revenues of about $12 million, a 66% growth rate over the last three years, and has been honored by Inc. 5000 five times.  That information is both good and (potentially) bad, because I’m frankly tired of working for big companies (3M, NYNEX, ComputerLand, BellSouth, AT&T) and much prefer the little ones.  During my interview, for example, the CEO and co-founder was apparently making faces at my interviewers behind my back – I like stuff like that.  A potential drawback, however, is its growth: I learned from my time at Compaid (an Inc. 500 honoree) that small, profitable, companies are ripe for takeover by the big boys.  I am really hoping that I don’t have to go through that garbage again…and the fact that The X Company’s been plugging away by itself for 15 years is heartening.

The job itself (Hosted Services Consultant 1) is a severe jump backward for me.  My paychecks will be just over half of what they were a month ago, I’ll be on the phone for much of the day, and I’m basically at the bottom of the barrel.  I think the “on the phone” part of that scenario is what disheartens me the most, but hopefully I can stay busy and interested enough to either enjoy it or advance out of it.  I still have a few leads with other companies, with jobs more suited to my experience and preferences, and I’ll wait to see if anything pans out with them.

I’ve cleared all the pre-hire hurdles with The X Company, however (background, credit, and urine checks), and am scheduled to start work next Monday morning.  In Alpharetta.  I forgot that part….my commute will go from 5 minutes to probably 45+ minutes.  No more lunches at home.

At least I’ll be doing something.  Unemployment has been, to put it mildly, sort of exhausting.  I’m still getting up at 5:30 – the cats don’t care if I’m going to work or not – but, after my walks, I’ve just been kind of sitting around playing tiddly winks.  No energy to do much of anything, and I’m usually wiped out by 5:00 in the afternoon and in bed by 7:30.

I do have some work to do in the next few days, however: cleaning the house in anticipation of a new roommate.  My friend Mary, who I’ve known for several years, is coming up on the end of her lease in March and will be taking up residence in the guestroom.  She’ll be bringing her adorable little cat, Pretty Princess, with her – which is both very cool and a bit terrifying.  I have no doubt that Joshua and Chamberlain will be quite welcoming, but Boo isn’t the friendliest kitty when it comes to meeting new friends.  It will be a fairly slow and cautious introduction, with alternating days of cats being closed up in different rooms so that everyone can get acquainted without much bloodshed.

Hey, Jenny and I combined four cats.  Hopefully, Mary and I can do the same.

The GBB is back in rehearsals as of last week (although I didn’t start until last night – had a terrible cold/flu last Tuesday night).  The board is being pretty active about looking for funding and additional performance opportunities, which is nice.  Our board has been pretty lethargic for several years, and it’ll be nice to have input and organization from more than just the 2-3 people who’ve been running the show.  We’ve got a mini-tour of GA, AL, and TN coming up in (I think) April, a return engagement to Kennesaw State in March, and a couple of other local gigs scheduled in May.  I wouldn’t mind adding two or three more gigs, but a lot of the band folks are really weird about that.  They don’t want to play more than 5-6 concerts a year.  Not sure why you’d want to be in a band if you don’t want to perform a lot….

The weather in Duluth has been, shall we say, varied as of late.  A week ago, it was 18 degrees during one of my morning walks.  Today, it was pushing 65.  I actually had the A/C on in my car yesterday.  Am still waiting for the “chill” hammer to fall, when we have temps in the 20s for a couple of weeks and I can watch my natural gas bill go through the roof.  But, so far at least, the utilities haven’t been too overwhelming.  Which is good…because I haven’t received my severance check yet, and February is going to be extremely tight, financially speaking.

That should be enough for now.  In a nutshell, it appears that I’ve survived my first layoff; my days of living alone are once again about to come to a halt; the weather is nuts; and my biggest opportunity to hike the Appalachian Trail has, at least for now, eluded me.

But I’m going to do it before I die.

Starting the Second Act

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Today’s featured image is of me sitting on the grave of Corinne Elliott Lawton (born September 21, 1846, died January 24, 1877) in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery.  According to legend, Miss Lawton’s expression changes depending on what she thinks about her visitors.  I did not know this when I took my seat and tried to mirror her, but now that I do, I assume that she’s smiling.  Right?

If you like cemeteries, you really owe it to yourself to visit Bonaventure.  It’s an amazing place with lots of famous dead people, fantastic statuary, and long avenues of old man’s beard-draped live oaks.  There’s also generally a really nice breeze coming in off of the Wilmington River.  Great place to spend an afternoon.

So I spent a fairly quiet Christmas at home yesterday.  Did some laundry, hung out with the cats, took a couple of naps, paid some bills, and contemplated the fact that my final paycheck from AT&T will be deposited in less than two weeks.  For all intents and purposes, my final day at work was last Friday, though I’ll go in today or tomorrow to finish clearing out my desk, wipe my laptop’s hard drive, turn in my company phone and ID badges, and continue to wonder just what the hell has happened.

I had an interview with a company called The X Company last Thursday, which is somewhat heartening.  At least I got past the initial phone call and actually got to go somewhere and sit in front of two hiring managers.  That led to a background check by their boss (in Bozeman, MT).  Assuming no murders are found, maybe I’ll get an offer.  If so, I’ll be starting at the bottom again, handling support requests from CPA firms who use The X Company’s cloud services.  It’s a small company (just over 100 employees), which is nice.  Not sure how interesting it’d be, but a foot in the door is all I’m looking for at this point.

I also had a phone interview with Americold, a company that provides refrigeration services from farm to market.  110 years old.  I’d never heard of them.  That job, should I get it, would require a bit of travel (domestic) and would feature working in “environments as cold as -20.”  I told the phone interviewer that I grew up in Vermont, so that second bit wouldn’t be too much of a problem.  The call was on Thursday and I had a pretty good reference as a lead, so maybe something will come of it.

Another lead came from a bar friend of mine who works for Ricoh.  After I told him that I didn’t see any jobs that I could do listed on the Ricoh website, he went to his boss and asked.  Boss said, “Get me his resume.  Sounds like we could use him for something.”  So I sent my resume to my buddy on Thursday afternoon and we’ll see if it goes anywhere from there.

And, finally, I got an email introduction from one of my tubist friends to a guy who owns a number of IT-related businesses.  Introduced myself and told him I’d get him a resume after the first of the year.  Not hugely hopeful about that, but who knows?

Regardless of all of that, unless I get a miraculous job offer from AT&T today or tomorrow, it’s time to start over at something new.  I never envisioned myself looking for a job at 51 and I’m not entirely sure what type of job I actually WANT, considering that it’s probably going to be my last one.  Don’t see any reason to throw in the towel on my computer experience – it’s the one thing that I know I can do – but I’ve let my mind wander about other possibilities.  Teaching beginning music – to adults or little kids – is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit.  Have also considered freelance programming and/or web design (a friend of mine in Canada does the latter – basically just tweaking WordPress themes for people and sometimes updating content).  And I’ve talked with a couple of people about helping the online side of their small businesses.

Then again, maybe I should just get a license to sell insurance or houses or something….though I’m not a salesman in any sense of the word.  Ideas?  Email them to me.

So the weather in Duluth has been nuts lately.  Today is supposed to be rainy and in the 60s.  Yesterday hit 70.  Last week it was clear and in the 20s.  It’s an adventure deciding what to wear for my morning walks every day.  Will I need long-johns or just sweat pants?  Sweatshirt or light jacket (or, this morning, just a tee)?  Wool socks? No socks?  I make more decisions before 6AM than most people do all day….

Anyway, the house and car are paid for through another month, I’ve got one check coming, and hopefully a big one due in February.  Combined with my renewed Costco card (which got two workouts last week….I’ve got enough food to last a year, I think), I just might make it for a little while.  Long enough to figure out the second act, hopefully.   Here’s hoping 2017 has something good in store.

Crunch Time

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It has been chilly for the last two days, with temps in the 20s when I take my morning walk.  That being the case, I finally turned on my heat this morning (it was 48 degrees in my living room), which is something that I dread doing every year for a few reasons.  First, I’m always mildly paranoid about firing up the furnace for the first time of the year.  I have this idea that all of the accumulated crud in my ducts is going to immediately burst into flame and I’ll have fire shooting out of my ceilings with no way to put it out.  I meant to have the ducts cleaned earlier this year (not sure if that would have done much good for my paranoia), but didn’t do it.  Also haven’t had the furnace checked since last spring – my furnace people are supposed to do it twice a year, but they haven’t called me so far this winter – and frankly I’d rather not have to write them a check right now.

Second, I really hate turning on the heat because, obviously, my gas bill will now increase – and I don’t need increased bills at this point.  As of 12/28, all of my AT&T crap is going to double in price already.  I’m currently determining what I can afford to do away with.  Cable (DirecTV) is obviously the first thing to get nuked.  DTV, to put it mildly, sucks.  However, once I get rid of it, then I no longer have unlimited data on my phone, which is kind of important.  I’ll go back to having 2GB/month, which normally would be enough, but when I’m sending resumes out from my phone, data adds up quickly.

Had to take Boo to the vet yesterday because she had an ingrown claw.  Jenny and I spotted it about two months ago, and I’d been hoping that she’d bite it off herself, but she didn’t.  Came home for lunch on Thursday and noticed that she was holding up her paw.  Wasn’t complaining, wasn’t limping, wasn’t averse to putting weight on the foot – but every time she sat down, she’d hold up her paw.  So I looked at it and the claw was completely embedded in her pad.  Off to the vet.  They cut it out (bled like a stuck pig), and all’s well now.  Boo took it like a little champ.  Only cried once and settled back in at home happily after the ordeal was over.  I’m a bit worried about infection, but she’s doing a good job licking at the wound.  Hopefully that will be enough.   The bill, by the way, was just shy of $100 (she also, by law, had to get a rabies shot.  Stupid).  That’s $100 that I didn’t want to spend.

So I got a letter from Meditech yesterday informing me that I’m not going to be working for them anytime soon.  I knew it was a long shot, but I really wanted to land that job.  The rejection definitely put me in a funk.  I’ve still got decent leads at Georgia MLS and The Salvation Army, but haven’t heard back from either of them after great initial contacts.   I’ve also become convinced that applying for jobs online is sort of like pissing into a storm drain and waiting for a glass of water to come out.  So I’ve decided that, next week, I’ll start contacting recruiters.  Didn’t want to have to go that route, because the recruiters that I’ve dealt with tend  to want to put me into jobs that I don’t particularly want, but as the title says, we’re getting to crunch time here, and I need to get a paycheck lined up somewhere.  As far as I know, I’ll get a check on 12/21, get fired on 12/27, get a final check on 1/6, and then – sometime, hopefully before March – I’ll get a severance check.  The danger zone in all of that is February.  I’m glad, of course, that I managed to pay off all of my credit cards this year, but doing so depleted by basically non-existent savings.  If I don’t have a paycheck or a severance check by March 1, I can’t pay the mortgage.

To that end, I’ve investigated the possibility of getting an hourly job at Kroger or somewhere.  I really don’t need to make a bunch of money to get by (and, obviously, making a bunch of money prior to now didn’t do me a great deal of good), and I figure I can get by fairly easily if I can take home about $500/week.  The only drawback to going an hourly route, be it at a grocery store or in retail or whatever, is that I can kiss the IT gig goodbye forever if I’m out of it for too long.  Not sure how I feel about that, considering that it’s what I’ve done for the last 26 years.  I have no problem with starting a second career, but I’d rather it not be a dead-end one.

Have been wracking my brain trying to figure out a way to make money on my own.  Internet-based stuff, home computer/phone repair, something like that.  I really am trying to see this as a good thing.  A way to have a second act.  The world’s my stage and all that.  But I’ve got to take care of the cats, and that means I’ve got to keep paying the mortgage.

And the high heating bills, apparently.

The caption for my picture, by the way (which I created in the months after AT&T acquired BellSouth) is “AT&T.  Your World.  Destroyed.”

I thought it was a fitting image for the way I feel today.

One of the Seven

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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.

 

PB&J

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No image for this post.  I apologize if you’re a picture kind of person.  Also, no cussing in this post – if you’re the kind of person who checks this blog every day, you got a profanity-laced one last week, which has since been made private.  I would’ve deleted it, but years from now I want to remember how I felt.

Anyway, here’s the deal.  Remember that I mentioned at the beginning of my week at Pictured Rocks that AT&T was going to lay people off?  Yeah, well, I’m one of those people.  In a nutshell, I’ve got until December 27th to find a new job.  If I can find another job at ATT (I’ve applied for 5), then I keep my years in service and it’s not a big deal.  If I can’t find an internal job by then, then I’m on the street, I get 50% of my salary in a lump sum (taxed to hell and back), and ATT wishes me good luck.

Having run the math about 400 times, I think I can live on that severance – if I eat beans and rice – for about a year.  I don’t want to eat beans and rice.  I particularly don’t want for my cats to eat beans and rice.

But that’s where I am at the moment.  I’ve applied, as I said, for multiple internal jobs – best case scenario even though I really hate ATT – and I’ve applied for multiple external jobs, which is almost wasted effort because I’m a jack of all IT trades and external jobs want specificity.  I’m over-qualified for damned near every job I’ve applied for, and damned near every employer will look at my resume and think that I’m not qualified.  So I’ve got that going for me.  If I have to go outside, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got to take an entry level job (and lie about my qualifications to do so) and start over.  I’m cool with that.  Not happy, but cool.  My kitties won’t know the difference.

Have talked to a friend who’s lease expires in February about renting a room from me.  Have talked to a senior director – who also got the axe – about a possible start-up company.  Have gotten through one interview with an outside company to be a systems admin 1 (major step backwards).  At this point, however, I’m still really scared.  I’ve tried being religious in the past.  It didn’t take. But if you’re religious, feel free to pray for me.

In an attempt to start saving money, I bought some peanut butter and jelly last week.  PB gives me incredible heartburn.  Jelly is way too sweet for me – I hate it.  But I made myself a PB&J sandwich tonight.  Two, actually.  I ate them.  They tasted terrible, and my stomach is currently rebelling on me.  It was cheap, though.  I can get through this.  I *will* keep my cats safe.  And they’ll stay together.  I don’t know exactly how I’ll do that if I get to the point where I can’t pay the mortgage….but they will stay together and they’ll be cared for.  I’m not married.  Have no children.  My kitties are my kids, though, and any of you who think that kids are more important need to stop reading this blog.  If not for my cats, I’d take the severance tomorrow and I’d be living in Canada.

So let’s end this one on a happy note.  The Cubs won the world series.  Dad, I’m sorry that it wasn’t the Indians…but come on: It was the Cubbies.  You can’t feel too bad about that. 108 years and all that.  Pretty good news.