Title: Pondering the job thing
Music du jour: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Party Doll
Random Link of the Day: The
Misanthropic Bitch site, which has been entertaining me for two solid days.
Hi, boys and girls! Welcome to Marcie's Dysfunctional Neighborhood! Won't you be... my neighbor?
Today's minor triumph: I was able to wheedle Security into giving me a duplicate key for my file cabinets at work. They got locked up a month or so ago, and then I managed to lose my keys. Go me. So I've been jonesing for my CD's, among other things. Now I have all my keys back. I had to get duplicates of EVERYTHING made last night, since I managed to conveniently lose my keyring -- three weeks ago.
Never let it be said that I don't procrastinate, and do it well.
It's getting to be crunch time with the job. I'm bored and overworked all at the same time, which is never a good combination. Being ten technicians short will burn you out pretty quickly. Most of us are riding with an average of between 35 and 50 tickets in our personal queues, which is ridiculously high. After a while it gets impossible to keep up with them all. I've been looking around for a new job for a while now, and in truth, I've seen a couple I would have jumped on if they'd been offered to me. Then there are one or two I'd take if I was out of a job and needed the work. There's a position like that with the Longmont Maxtor R&D facility (the hard drive company). I'm meeting with the HR puke and the geek boss tomorrow for lunch; I have a feeling they're going to offer me the Unix spot, and I don't know what I'm going to say yet.
On the surface, the position looks decent: fairly standard bennies package, four weeks of personal time per year (which is very nice), the chance to work in a smaller shop with a standardized Solaris environment, and basically being the primary Unix geek supporting a load of chip design engineers. Here's the hitch: I have a really weird gut feeling that tells me not to take the job. Why? I don't know. Maybe because the lead tech (my boss, if I took the job) intimidated the absolute hell out of me at the interview. Maybe because I've been working for Sun, which is growing and expanding like crazy, and the hard drive industry is fairly static. The truth is, I don't know, and it's niggling at me. If I'm going to turn down a job, I'd at least like to have a good reason.
In truth, I could probably do better. If I wasn't so sick of this place, I might not even be considering it. But I still wouldn't know why. It's just a vibe I get, or something. I was edgy while I was there. I'm sure it had something to do with it being an interview and everything; it didn't help that I totally forgot I had this interview scheduled last week and spaced it. (Oops... heh.) The HR puke and the geek boss seem to like me, though. Figure that. I'd actually feel bad about turning them down. It's not like there aren't a zillion Unix geeks in this town, though.
Okay, I got a plan. I'll go to the power lunch with the Maxtor pukes tomorrow, listen to what they have to say, and go back to my boss tomorrow afternoon and throw their offer letter down on his desk. And then I'll say, "Do something nice for me, or I walk." It's a bluff, true, but it's a good bluff... he knows I'm sick of the situation the way it is. A spot bonus would be nice. A transfer out of here for a while would be even better. Maybe do some kind of field site work and get off the queue. Yeah.
Man, do I need a vacation. Good thing Cynthia is coming to visit for Thanksgiving. She gets here Wednesday morning. Werd.
-- marcie.