Terrible Analogies

My company is getting ready to move into a bigger and better building next month (with a gym!).

To help facilitate the move, my group was asked to move into cubicles across the hall so our wing can be dismantled and hauled over to the new digs.

And so, like any other employee who’s been asked to partake in such a transition, I immediately tracked down an empty box, gathered all of my belongings, relocated my computer and all of its sundries, and was settled into my new temporary cubicle in roughly 20 minutes. I powered up my computer, logged into Outlook, and then looked around to notice that everyone else on my team was still hard at work moving.

Much like when moving out of a house, most people have more objects tucked away in their cubicle than they know what to do with.

A quick walkthrough of the IT floor at my place of employment would back up this assertion; everywhere I look people seem to have piles of paper on their desks, stacks of toys, collections of food, and enough office accessories to make one of those people on Hoarders shake their head in disbelief (well, except for that guy with the rats. I don’t think anything fazes him). And I used to be of the same mindset. At my last job my cubicle was in a similar state of disrepair. It wasn’t only until I gave them my two weeks notice and began the arduous task of cleaning out my cubicle did I realize how much crap I had managed to accumulate in my seven year tenure over there.

I’ve since gone Zen over the whole cubicle thing. My cube now consists of a bottle of multivitamins, hand sanitizer, and a yo-yo ball (hey, I can’t give up all my toys!). Where my movie posters and satirical clippings and signs used to hang I now have a printout of the organizational chart. Where my action figures used to wage war every day at lunch now sits a box of Peeps whom I shall soon put out of their misery (once they get stale enough for my tastes).

My desk looks nearly as bare as Neo’s did in the movie The Matrix.

I’m not a “neat freak”. But when it comes to work, I finding that being a minimalist suits me just fine. After all, we have to move again at the end of May, and it’ll be nice to be able to make the transition with nothing more than a half empty box tucked under my arm.

I’ll let the guy in Help Desk who has a life-sized statue of the Terminator and that one DBA who has a fish tank in his office worry about the big move. Bring it on. I’m ready for it.

….my old job, that is.

It’s funny what a change in venue will do for a person’s self-esteem, confidence, and drive.

At my previous place of employment, our manager was replaced with a bitter, hard-nosed individual who, quite simply, was not a joy a be around. Motivation meant vague threats, plenty of eye-rolling, and vocal outbursts. When I learned that he used to work as a prison guard, it all made sense: the baldness, the daily trips to the gym, and the Napoleonic complex that screamed “I’m going to step on anybody that gets in my way of a corner office”.  This was the direction in culture that my old job was headed, and it wasn’t a good fit for me.

When I had all that I could take I started looking for another job, and luckily I found one with a nice bump in pay, more responsibility, and the ability to stretch out and actually learn some cool things.  I left my old position without burning any bridges…and now I actually look forward to coming into work where the entire company actually works together as a team.  Everyone from the engineers, networking guys, CIS, administrators, designers, admins, help desk, and even the owner of the company is there to pitch in.  There are absolutely no egos.  No friction.  Just professionals putting out a damn fine product.

And even on nights when I need to work overtime (like last night), I actually want to work overtime.

Not since the good ole’ days (oh, how I miss them) when I worked in a comic book store as a kid did I so thoroughly enjoy my job.  And honestly, how many people can say that?  I count myself lucky…

And to my dad who once told me that, “Son, nobody enjoys their job,” I’m sorry but I have to respectfully disagree  :-)

Forgive me for lack of a proper update, but I’ve been working a SQL problem for the past 8 hours, only to discover that the base install was misconfigured. Let’s hear it for customers who think they know what they’re doing…

And so, for the next four hours or so I’ll be working a bit of overtime to correct the situation. Please accept my apologies for sloughing off at work instead of providing a decent update

And please forgive me for not having the time to comment on the blogs that I follow. Honestly, I feel bad about not having the time to visit tonight.

Will see you (hopefully) tomorrow…

While browsing our Microsoft Exchange server, I happened upon a user with a most unfortunate username:

I wonder if he thinks that this was done on purpose, or if he silently curses his misfortune for having a name that conveniently represents a part of the anatomy?

It’s 8pm and I’m sitting my cubicle, chained to my keyboard, being forced to hammer out code for an emergency investigation into a critical environment whose heap size keeps filling up under mysterious circumstances and causing processes to fail.

I’m building a tool that will monitor process heap sizes, forward them when certain criteria are met, then create dump logs of suspect running tasks as specific conditions arise.

Yes. This is how I spend some of my days.

Please accept my apologies for lack of a witty, thought provocative, or entertaining post today (yeah, like I have many of those)…and for not having time to visit my favorite blogs tonight. Here’s hoping things settle down enough for me to enjoy the upcoming weekend.

Happy Friday! I’m already looking forward to the upcoming truncated week