I’ve been harping on myself lately for missing out on writing about current events in my life. Before Connor, I spent most of my evenings blogging or journaling longhand about the goings-on of a given day, or writing in-depth about some tiny philosophical point. Nowadays, I tend to skip past delving into even major life events in favor of a quick 120-character tweet.
Not today.
Today, I got the promotion I’ve been waiting years to get.
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I so rarely write about my job that I actually did a double-take when I saw that my last entry in this category was while I was pregnant with Connor. I even went back to the old Movable Type installation (still in place for occasions such as this) to make sure something didn’t get missed in the port over to WordPress.
Nope. It really has been that long since I’ve weighed in about work.
Which is funny, since so many of my early entries (2002-2004) were centered around how unhappy I was in my bank gig. In those early days of blogging (early days for me, anyway), I didn’t think about searchability or future repercussions about complaining about one’s job online and naming names.
But I digress. I hadn’t intended to make this a meta-blog post about blogging about work.
I’ve been at my current Data Warehousing job for five years, six months. When I started, I knew zilch about Data Warehousing. My hiring manager told me that my job in the beginning was “to be a sponge.” I was hired to add that graphic design element to the team, to be the person who can make all the hard work on the back end look aesthetically pleasing and well-organized on the front end.
Over time, I was taught all about data warehouses. Operational data stores. Extraction, transformation, and loading. Replicated databases. Incremental loads. I learned about the dashboarding/reporting software we had at the time, and learned how to set up projects and filters and metrics and attributes and reports and dashboards.
After the manager who hired me left the company, somehow my path went astray. I was still to be a sponge, but I didn’t get the opportunity to build many dashboards. I did learn more about ETL and SQL and I got more comfortable with data and report building, but it wasn’t until a couple years later that I got to do any dashboarding outside the initial one I built when I was first hired in. Since then, I’ve ramped up and found my niche.
Now, I’m informally considered the Lead UI Designer on our team (although if I had a new job title, I’d prefer to be a Front-End Developer — avoiding buzz words that might have a different meaning than intended). I’ve worked on my hiring manager’s initial vision of unifying all the DW reports under a single style and “brand,” and I’ve built a total of two dashboard suites (corporate and individual facility views with drill-through reports for each) in MicroStrategy and three in Microsoft Reporting Services, currently in the mockup and specification phase of a fourth, with a fifth on the horizon in Q3.
Not bad for a Visual Communication major who taught herself SQL at her bank job.
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This week’s baby-related acquisitions: car seat and stroller. Both second-hand, both in fine shape. The car seat we got from our awesome friends Doug and Erika, whose daughter has moved up in the world from infant seat to convertible seat. The stroller we got from Once Upon A Child, which we’ve been frequenting for the past several weeks, so we knew when we saw a slightly-nicer-looking-than-usual Graco stroller for $48 that we may as well jump on it.
We ended up with the Graco Infant SafeSeat and the Graco Quattro Tour Deluxe stroller. Granted, the patterns don’t match, but we don’t particularly care; we basically got a $200+ travel system used for $50. Once Junior grows out of the car seat, we’ll have the option of either keeping the stroller or trading it back to the secondhand store for credit and purchasing a lighter-weight stroller that fits in the trunk a little easier.
The only thing we still need to buy that isn’t on our registry is our crib mattress. We won’t know until after our shower how much we’ll still need to buy for ourselves: mattress cover, changing pad, bouncer, pack-n-play, etc.
In other preparations, I’ve been reading craptons of books, asking questions of my parental friends on Facebook, listening to podcasts, that sort of thing. Between all that, the hospital tour, and the impending Childbirth Express class coming up in a couple of weekends, I’m feeling surprisingly unstressed… sometimes. Sometimes I do get into a tizzy of OMG I CAN’T BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANOTHER HUMAN BEING — I’M NOT DONE WITH MYSELF YET, but it doesn’t usually last for long, thankfully.
I’m well into the phase where strangers greet me with either a double-take at my belly or just straight-up asking me when I’m due. I get a lot of “Boy, you’ve probably had enough of this heat!” Luckily, I’ve gotten better with the small talk the longer I’ve worked in an office environment, so I can smile and answer with something appropriate, depending on who’s asking.
My co-worker is due exactly one week before me, so it’s also fun to get comments from other employees from other departments, usually asking about how our boss is dealing with the situation. It’s even better if he’s there, too, so we can get his reaction. Today, for example:
Marketing Bigwig, to my co-worker: When are you due?
Co-worker: September 19th — and she’s due a week after me!
Me: Yep, I’m due September 26th.
Marketing Bigwig, to our boss: And what are you going to do?
Our Boss: Cry.
Priceless.
I don’t often write about my job, 1.) because my job requires some explanation for anyone outside of my field to really understand what I do; 2.) because I rarely need to vent about my job; 3.) because my co-workers are tech-savvy enough to find my blog and read it; and 4.) because I know for a fact that IS Security (or someone in the company, anyway) has a search out for instances of our company name, and I’m not comfortable coming up on their radar. I’m proud of how far I’ve come in my job, though, and tonight I feel like sharing.
I came into my current job ignorant of all the concepts of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI); now, just over three years later, I have a pretty solid grasp of most of it. I still have room to grow, though, and am trying to take advantage of every opportunity to do so.
I started out in this job learning MicroStrategy, which is BI software that specializes in being a one-stop shop for many flavors of reporting: grids and graphs, formatted documents, drill-down reports, ad-hoc (i.e. build-your-own) reporting, dashboards, et al. I got to learn about the concepts of data warehousing and the rules of our own business while also learning how to create objects in this software program that corresponded to those conceptual bits. It worked out fairly well, actually, and I became one of the main MicroStrategy developers on our team (as the hiring manager had intended).
Over time, I got to dig into SQL — which, for you non-IT folks out there, is a query language for databases. I knew some SQL going in (I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten the job otherwise), but my knowledge was rudimentary at best. My supervisor gave me some non-time-sensitive projects that stretched my SQL knowledge and skill, and those definitely helped me grow as a developer.
I’ve gotten to dig into other software, too, including Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and, most recently, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). SSIS has been the one technology that has been holding me back from feeling like a “real” developer, since it’s at the heart of everything the DW team does. Sure, I can make an accurate and legible report from the warehoused data, but I haven’t been able to transform the data myself.
It’s also been a bit of a roadblock for me: the one time a potential learning-type project arose, the deadline was too soon for my comfort, and I turned it down… and another opportunity for me to jump into the technology didn’t arise until very recently. In the interim, my discomfort and uncertainty surrounding the software has compounded onto itself, which isn’t helpful to anyone. Especially me.
Right now, I’m wrapping up development on a project that combines several technologies that are new to me, including SSIS and SSRS, but with reporting content that is refreshingly familiar (this report was one of the first I worked on after being hired, and it’s time to convert it to a new technology). It’s exciting to be three years into a relatively comfortable gig and still be branching out into new and unfamiliar territory.
Sometimes — frequently, actually — I feel like the youngest fairy godmother at the party: my contributions feel ineffectual and barely necessary. Intellectually, I know this isn’t so, especially since I’ve been a major player in several key projects — but the intellectual side of my brain doesn’t often talk to the emo side. Once I beef up my technical knowledge, software proficiency, and programming skills, I’m sure I’ll start feeling like a bigger contributor to the DW team.
(Also — shh, don’t tell! — I’m redoubling my efforts in an attempt to get promoted to Level 2 by my next Annual Performance Review. This has been the longest stretch of employment I’ve ever been without a promotion and, no, sir, I don’t like it.)
All across the Midwest this morning, dozens of people had a very similar experience to mine: we all got stuck in the snow, and were subsequently rescued, one way or another.
My version of the story goes a little something like this:
I got up just a little early this morning, knowing that I’d be heading outside to somewhere between three and six inches of snow. (The official count for last night and this morning was four inches.) Made it out to the car earlier than usual, but around the time I should really leave to get to work on time in good weather. (Did I mention that I’m chronically late in the mornings? But you knew that already, didn’t you?) Brushed the snow off the car, scraped the windshield, got back into a relatively toasty-warm car, and backed out the driveway.
And promptly got stuck at the bottom.
See, not only does the city never plow our street, but our one-year-old Kia Forte is sporting the all-season performance tires from the factory, which makes for a poor winter driving combination. Add to that the fact that I always try to power out of the driveway without shoveling, and it’s unsurprising that we occasionally have winter driving troubles. (Except for the fact that our old Spectra was a real champ in snow, and only got stuck in 6-inch-plus drifts.)
Next step: e-mail the boss from my iPhone. “My car’s stuck in the snow in the street in front of my house, since the city rarely plows my street unless 2ft of snow falls,” I wrote. “I’m going to do some shoveling and see if I can get it free. I’ll keep you posted.”
I did my usual getting-unstuck tricks: turn the wheel right, go forward, go reverse. Turn it left, try forward, try reverse. Try pulsing the accelerator and rocking. Try putting it in neutral and getting out to push.
What didn’t I try? Waking up my husband to help. I didn’t want to wake him up in the middle of the “night,” since his schedule is so different from mine.
E-mailed the boss again: “I guess my car’s going to stay stuck for a while longer. For now, I’ll plan to be in for a half day, but I’ll let you know if I get unstuck sooner.” I knew I’d at least get the car out once Aaron got up, but I must admit that visions of a snow day were dancing in my head.
So, what to do until then? How about shoveling the driveway while waiting for inspiration to strike?
In my work clothes. And my gloves with the hole worn in the ring finger — which works out well for iPhone usage, but not so much for being out in sub-freezing temps for extended periods of time. Even now, twelve hours later, the pad of my left-hand ring finger isn’t quite back to normal.
As I shoveled, I’d get ideas: how about throwing some ice melt under the tires? How about making sure the front bumper isn’t stuck on the lip of the driveway? And I’d take a break to try my new ideas, but only be rewarded with the smell of burning rubber and the knowledge that I should stop before I ruined our tires.
Finally, once I got the driveway cleared, I saw the garbage truck coming up the road. I’d been dreading this, since I wasn’t sure if he’d have enough clearance to pick up our garbage with his mechanical truck arm or to turn around in the dead-end. I headed down to the car armed with the shovel, to pretend to hack out the front tires some more.
Luckily, he had no problem emptying our trash can. In fact, once he got our trash, he stepped out of the truck and asked if I was stuck.
“Yeah, for about an hour,” I replied.
He graciously offered to help, and asked for my keys. I knew he wasn’t going to abscond with my Kia and leave his garbage truck in the street, so I handed him the keys and let him give it a go while I watched. I hadn’t turned off the anti-skid feature, though, so only one tire was spinning, trying to get traction. We traded spots and he pushed from the front as I pulsed it in reverse — and finally, FINALLY, it moved into the street. I got out of the car and waved him a thank-you as he hopped back into his truck, and I headed up the driveway to get my purse and lunch (and to e-mail my boss that I was unstuck).
As I walked up the driveway toward the house, I looked back to see the garbage truck off-road it up into the empty field across the street and make a giant turnaround in the snow and grass, no problem. I laughed aloud.
Came back, put the car into drive — stuck AGAIN?
I’m pretty sure I yelled aloud in the car, “What the FUCK?!”
Got out a few times, cleared away the few inches of snow in the road around the tires, put it in reverse and drive and back, and finally got going.
Final departure time: 9:15am.
The roads actually weren’t so bad en route to work. Of course, as soon as I got going, I noticed that the idiot light for Low Tire Pressure was on, so I stopped into the nearest gas station (close to the $1.00-per-use-quarters-only air pump) to double-check that no real harm was done to my tires. After doing a twice-around on the car, I was pretty sure it was complaining about the tire that had been doing most of the spinning and smoking in the street; it wasn’t dangerously low, or even really noticeably low, if I hadn’t been looking for it.
It’s really hard for me to ignore idiot lights, though. I got to work just fine — and home, too — but that light was screaming at me the whole time. If the $1 air pump had an air pressure gauge on it, I might have ponied up the coin and aired up the tires. As it was, I let it go. I’ve driven on lower.
But, yeah. I got to work a little late, and a bit cold and irritated, but safe.
Aaron was surprised to see the driveway shoveled when he got up! He texted me around lunchtime and asked exactly what had happened (after seeing my tweets) and gave me permission to wake him up in case of emergency in the future. Which I really should have thought to do, but I wanted to be all independent or something, I guess.
Nice start to winter — and it’s not even technically winter yet.