dianaschnuth

My modus operandi with e-mail is to leave “pending” items in my inbox, then file them when I’ve done whatever it is that needs to be done with them. Reply to them, take action on them, whatever. While that works out well at my job, it only plays to my procrastinating tendencies at home, leading me to have e-mails in my inbox from literally five years ago.

It’s fun interesting looking back at some of the stuff I’d intended to blog, but never got around to it, being that some of it ended up being mildly prescient / prophetic:

Fri 15 Dec 2006 | 4:47 PM

I’m not one to fall into the trap of blogging about specifics at work. Suffice to say that I have evidence that the high turnover rate in my department of late is likely to continue in the future. Our previous clockwork vibe is long gone, co-workers are complaining about one another, and our supervisor and her actions are unpopular in certain circles. The few people who have the best interests of the department in mind (myself included) are quickly moving toward just doing our jobs and the extra mile be damned.

Fri 29 Dec 2006 | 4:49 PM

I figured out last night why I’m so stressed about the possibility of losing this pregnancy. There will never be another individual exactly like this little one that’s brewing right now. Even though it can’t yet see, or hear, and doesn’t even really have opposable thumbs yet, it has the potential to be a unique human being. If it doesn’t make it, it’s not only a child I wouldn’t get to raise, but it’s a person who wouldn’t exist. It’s like some weird wersion of It’s A Wonderful Life or a Richard Bach story, thinking of all the people who haven’t existed due to miscarriage or abortion. Who knows what potential leaders or philanthropists were never born, but were, in fact, meant to be?

Then, there are some slightly more recent almost-blogs that are more applicable to my life as it is today:

Mon 19 Nov 2007 | 4:21 PM

[My old job] vs. [my new job] is like marching band vs. drum corps – no one is here who doesn’t want to be here. Everyone is all business.

Also? Seniority is directly related to a person’s proximity to a window. At least in my dept.

(Incidentally? I will shortly be moving to a cube two spots closer to the window, after a year and change.)

Finally, there are some random goodies that are fun any day of the week:

Mon 27 Aug 2007 | 3:45 PM

[Heard at work:] “…teach them their prayers.” Does God not listen to you unless you know the magic words? Mormons learn God’s secret handshake in the temple, though, and that’s no less ridiculous.

Fri 27 Jun 2008 | 11:30 AM

From a DBA [database administrator] at work, about a debacle he helped create: “Bah. That’s part of the job. They just misspell it: should be DBAcle.”

I still have about 80 e-mails in my inbox, dating back to January 2005 (the oldest ones are from genealogists and possible distant cousins looking to share research). Considering that I was way over 100 last week, I’m well on my way to zero.

Once again, from the depths of my unclean inbox:

17 November 2005 | 4:08pm

note to self: office soap operas are fun. changing info on one’s own loan can turn out to be very un-fun, however, especially when it results in termination.

I’d wager that the statute of limitations on this story has expired, so I’ll go ahead and tell it, since not only has the employee in question long since been terminated, but her former company is also defunct.

The employee in question — we’ll call her N — had apparently been making small but unauthorized changes to her personal line of credit for some time, and no one had noticed. We worked in Loan Corrections, after all, so part of our job was to adjust interest rates upon request. Where N made her mistake, however, was cutting her interest rate by some 6% or more one day.

The comic tragedy of all this, and how she got caught, is that Loan Corrections also monitored changes made to interest rates for lines of credit, and confirmed that those changes were correct and authorized. Had N only waited until it was her turn to monitor rate changes, she might have gotten off scot free. As it was, a particularly diligent employee (not me, thankfully) was on rate changes that week, and saw that N had made a change to her own loan. He took it to our supervisor, and the rest was history.

I honestly don’t remember exactly how things went down, but I do remember that her takedown was swift. Most Many of us didn’t know what had happened, why N wasn’t at work, and why N’s desk was being cleared out until the rumor mill swung into action.

Ah, the hijinks and hilarity of working at a bank.

(Despite the fact that my blog is still somewhat broken, design-wise, I’m going to post new entries, anyway. Hopefully I’ll get things worked out soon.)

Yesterday was my one-year anniversary in Data Warehousing, and I’m not sure how to articulate how I feel about that. Actually, I’m not sure I even know how I feel myself.

I’ve learned so much in one year, definitely, but I often feel that a.) that’s only because I came in knowing so little, and b.) I have a daunting amount yet to learn. When I started here, I had experience putzing around with MySQL and PHP, and had co-built the infamous Request Log Access Database with James. Since then, I’ve learned concepts that I didn’t even know existed (like the concept of a Data Warehouse), and built up from there with technologies and applications and best practices.

Oftentimes, though, I feel like the youngest fairy godmother. I can’t do anything totally awesome (yet), but I can do little helpful things. Which, to be fair to myself, is really selling myself short. I’m finally to a point where I can solve problems on my own, and actually discuss solutions with my supervisor and come up with valid and original ideas, and not have to go yell for help multiple times a day.

Seems like, whenever I blog about how I feel about work, it comes across as a major downer. Which it’s not, really. I don’t dislike my job. I like certain aspects of it a lot, although I do miss certain things from my old job(s).

I’ve come to realize that I miss having a “work spouse” in James, and having multiple work friends to shoot the shit with. I guess I just don’t feel like I “click” with very many people at the new gig, although that’s coming along slowly. I’ve never been one to make friends very quickly, as my drum corps buddies will confirm. It’s awesome having Sheryl around now, though; she’s the one person I feel like I can be completely free and open around, and not have to worry about making the wrong impression, or seeming unprofessional, or whatever my problem is.

So, after one year? Social skills still need some work. Technical skills seem to be progressing at a reasonable pace. Not planning to look for a new gig anytime soon (which is a definite improvement on my last place of employment, as I was trying to get out of there every year or so).

I finally have a real career track. Holy shit.

When writing about work, a good rule of thumb (it seems to me) is not to write anything you wouldn’t want your supervisor — or *their* supervisor — to read. So, keeping my boss’s boss in mind…

This morning, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a good two minutes straight, fighting with myself. I’d been having some gastrointestinal discomfort (read: poop cramps) all day Sunday, and they’d kept me up for part of the night into Monday morning. I’d finally gotten to a comfortable place in my sleep cycle when my alarm went off; I turned it off without hitting snooze, then realized what I’d done. But, in my half-asleep state, I didn’t really care. I let myself drift back to sleep.

So, as I stood in front of the mirror, finally, I was already running late. Which is to say, later than usual. I was still mildly uncomfortable, and definitely still tired, and very much not ready to tackle a day of figuring out what questions to ask to learn a new technology (SSIS, for any geeks following along at home).

I made a decision: I went downstairs, booted up my computer, fired up my work webmail, and e-mailed my supervisor (and her supervisor, too, since I knew my supervisor was planning to be out of the office today) and said that I wasn’t feeling well, and that I wouldn’t be coming in today.

Then I went back to bed.

I drifted in and out of sleep for the next three hours, waiting for Aaron to wake up enough that I could tell him I’d called off of work. The UPS man woke us both up around 11am, at which point I told Aaron that I’d called in. He went back to sleep, then, and I got up.

My gastrointestinal discomfort had passed (so to speak) by 11:30, and I briefly considered going in to work for a half day. The prospect of another afternoon at home with my husband was too alluring, though; anyone who reads my blog regularly will likely know that Aaron works nights, so I only get to see him on the weekends, and for fifteen minutes after I get home from work on weekdays.

So, I stayed home. And I did have an enjoyable afternoon with Aaron, although I spent a lot of time mentally flogging myself for taking the day off of work when I probably certainly could have pushed through it.

The thing is? I didn’t *have* to go and push through it. I have plenty of sick days to use — more than I’m used to having at my disposal. At my old job, I got five personal days (to be scheduled in advance) and five sick days (to be used as needed). For the whole year. End of story. Here, I still start with 40 hours sick time at the beginning of the year, to be used in half-day increments. Once I dip into those hours, though, I get eight more hours added onto my balance per month, to bring me back up to a max of 40 hours of usable sick time.

If I felt like my presence were necessary and vital — like, say, my supervisor’s is — I’d feel more guilty for using this sick time for anything less than bronchitis. Truth be told, though, this under-experienced “piece of clay” is feeling a little overkneaded. I could really use some time to dig deeper into what I’ve learned so far, instead of switching to something completely new. At the same time, I really do want to learn SSIS, and now seems to be good timing for it, project-wise and personnel-wise.

I’m so, SO grateful for the opportunity to learn, basically, an entirely new skill for me: data warehousing. I’m glad to no longer be living paycheck to paycheck. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I just need to fix myself. I need to realign my brain to be more OK with the not-knowing.

No more sick days this year. I’ll have them to burn, yes, but I won’t. I won’t do it.

“Can I have a word with you?”

These are not the words anyone wants to hear from their supervisor at 9:00am. I’d come in late this morning (again), so I thought that maybe I was about to get a talking-to about my tendency to tardiness. My supervisor looked around for a private place to talk, then gestured me into the copy room.

Incidentally, most people seem to think that the copy room affords them some measure of privacy. As my cube is right next to the copy room, I can assert that it does not. Just because you can’t see anyone else doesn’t mean that your conversation isn’t carrying out into the hallway.

In the copy room, my supervisor told me that there’s a person or department who checks the internet for references to our company, and that I had blogged about it by name. At this point, my brain started whirling — I didn’t talk smack about work, did I? — and I know that my eyes had to have been giant saucers of Oh-Shit-ness, because she kept a very amiable tone and tried to be reassuring and factual. She explained that the person who monitors the spider or search or proprietary whatever-it-is that finds mention of our company online noticed that a Toledo employee had written about the company.

(In my mind, the SWAT team from The Blues Brothers movie comes swarming down the sides of the pointy pink building I work in, as IS Security blares an alarm: WE HAVE A BLOGGER ON THE PREMISES.)

The problem was not that I had written about the company — I did not, in fact, talk any smack about my employer, as I value my job and know that the internet is a very visible and accessible place. The problem was that I posted my del.icio.us link about the company at 2:46 PM on a weekday. During work hours.

I was incredibly flustered. I explained to my supervisor that it was just one of those online bookmark sites, and I saw the article and posted it, and it automatically posted to my blog later, and I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I’m sure I ran off at the mouth and sounded excessively nervous, because she calmly and kindly assured me that she didn’t see it as a problem, but that I should keep in mind that blogging during office hours is against company policy.

That pretty much wrecked my flow for the rest of the day.

After I retired to my cube and got my heart out of my throat and back where it belonged, I started to wonder how they knew I had blogged during work hours. After all, my del.icio.us links don’t display a timestamp, and the timestamp on my blog is 11:00pm, when the del.icio.us feed posts my daily links. All day, I was convinced that Security must have actually sought out my blog (hi, guys! *waves*) to see if I made any other references to the company, then found my Twitter posts throughout the day, and busted me on that. As it turns out, though, the timestamp for my del.icio.us link is right there in the RSS feed. So, nothing vindictive or borderline unfair was going on in Security. Just that one post.

Still, though, I’m going to lay low for a while, as far as internet at work is concerned.