About Work

I don’t blog about my job very much these days. The main reason for this, to be totally frank, is that I got the ever-loving shit scared out of my when Security found out I’d posted a del.icio.us link during business hours and mentioned my employer by name. (That one link, by the way, is the only mention of my employer’s name on my blog, and I’m planning to keep it that way. Google is one of my biggest referrers.)

The other reason is that I don’t really have much to say about work. There’s very little angst that comes home from work with me; I leave work at work, for the most part. Then there’s the fact that my work is in Information Services, in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence — these are subcategories of IT/IS that I hadn’t even heard of before I applied for the job, so I’m guessing that most of my technical MicroStrategy blog entries go over the heads of my regular readers.

Today, though, I do have a few things to say about work. I’ve kind of been saving them up in my Moleskine notebook, and they don’t really merit a blog entry each… so, here we go.

7/28/09

I can tell by about 10am which workdays will by productive and which will be a wash. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to reset an unfocused day.

I wrote this during a spell when I didn’t have any hard and fast upcoming deadlines. Amazing how a close deadline can motivate me to work harder and faster, ask questions, and focus on my work, even when I seem to be getting a cold. Hell, I was tempted to call in today, but talked myself out of it because I have a project that needs to go into production before Friday of this week.

8/21/09

My job right now is combining Business Intelligence reporting with layout and CSS. I’m loving it. Realizing that I’m a nuts-n-bolts designer: not necessarily artistic, but a problem-solver. I love messing with CSS.

Back when I was job-hunting, I almost took a job at a web design firm, writing CSS and coding website layouts. I would have taken the job, too, even though it was a part-time contract gig, if they hadn’t given me an unusually restrictive non-compete to sign.

Glad I held out. I got a waaaay better gig, for sure.

Still, though, my current gig had quite a learning curve, and I found myself wondering when I’d ever end up in a new job that uses one (or more) of my existing skill sets. So, I was mighty pleased when I got to start working on designing dashboards and customizing stylesheets. Granted, content is king — which, in my industry, basically means that the data needs to be a.) correct and b.) useful — but presentation doesn’t deserve the back-burner it so often gets. I thrive on rearranging other people’s kludgy layouts, plugging in RGB values to match the portal color palette, tweaking font sizes, making the whole thing fit on one page legibly… I could work on the presentation layer all day. I get in the zone, in the flow, and time just goes away. I love to get things looking Just So.

That’s only a very small part of my job these days, but it is part, and I enjoy it.

My annual review is coming up in about two and a half months — that’ll be my two-year anniversary with the company. Even though I’m not expecting to get a merit raise (since the company has put a temporary freeze on raises), I’m looking forward to getting an extra-big pat on the back, and seeing where I should go from here. There’s still so much to learn at my job, both in BI and in other technologies my team uses.

It’s not like I wake up early every morning, super gangbusters excited to go sit in my cubicle and do my thing, but I do enjoy what I do. I certainly don’t dread going to work like I have in the past. My work is fulfilling, my co-workers are personable and helpful, and my direct supervisor definitely ranks in the top five I’ve ever had.

That’s why I don’t blog about work much. I have nothing to vent about.

…Wow, I hope those aren’t Famous Last Words.

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