dianaschnuth

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.

Early tomorrow — well, early for me, anyway –I’ll be heading out with my supervisor and her supervisor to Cleveland, where we intend to be shocked and awed by the upcoming release of our Business Intelligence software of choice. The plan is for me to leave my house at 6:10am, pick up my supervisor, and head to the office, where we’ll be meeting her supervisor. He will graciously drive us to downtown Cleveland, where the MicroStrategy Roadshow will last all morning.

Expect a multitude of tweets to come through tomorrow, as I publish my opinions to whomever will listen — and, as usual, try not to make an everlasting and well-documented ass of myself on the internet.

Mr. Hange’s Advanced American History class was an anomaly for me; while I enjoyed his irreverent teaching style, I performed poorly on projects and tests, and ultimately got a particularly shitty grade. I’m a habitual procrastinator, and my projects and papers reflected that.

The tests were all essay.

Mr. Hange looked for particular concepts and vocabulary to appear in each answer. To his credit, he did tell us in advance what information we should be sure to include, should we be asked about certain things. Hell, I think he even gave us some of the questions in advance, if not all. I was never good at studying for tests, though, and American History was no exception. That was the first class in which I ever attempted to cheat on a test (and believe you me, it’s hard to read your neighbor’s essay test using only your peripheral vision).

He was also very strict about demanding that every essay question had at least a topic sentence written on the page. If a student left any question completely blank, they would get a zero on the entire test. I remember thinking that the rule was a little stupid, considering that my topic sentences would generally be horrendously generic and pedantic restatements of the question.

Fast forward about 15 years: I’m sitting at my desk at work, taking a project that was created in one reporting application and recreating it in another. Some of it should be fairly straightforward, now that I have the logic straight, but I’m not sure how I’m going to solve certain problems I’m having.

Enter the memory of Mr. Hange’s class.

I take the stapled packet of some eight reports and go through each, doing what I can, noting what still needs to be done. It feels so much like going through those stapled sheets, a typewritten challenge heading each one, and writing those topic sentence restatements before going back to finish the real work at hand.

Granted, today’s project involved a lot more than just a cursory topic sentence, but it still reminded me of 11th grade.

So, even though I totally sucked it up in your class, Mr. Hange, I still learned something from your essay tests. Thanks.

(By the way? I also remember the SQRRL method of scan-question-read-reread-learn; and that the war hero usually gets at least the presidential nomination, if not the presidency; and that inauguration addresses really shouldn’t be that long in February; and about how tradition is a hard habit to break; and that Indiana is EAST of Illinois. Among other things.)

This past Thursday was our contractor’s last day at work. She’d been using a cubicle recently vacated by a former member of our team, so my boss asked me if I wanted to move into that cube when the contractor left. I agreed; it would be closer to the rest of the team, and closer to the window.

I was surprised to find the cubicle much less vacant than I had expected. A clip-on fan, a full pen caddy, a stapler, and multiple stacks of paper and legal pads and other randomness awaited me. The cube was also incredibly dusty and dirty, with tape-marks on the metal cabinets and various rings and dirt marks on other surfaces. Seemed a little unfair that I cleaned out my old cube as best I could, just to move into a new cube that needed cleaning, as well.

This new cube is right next to my supervisor’s, and is directly across from another co-worker’s, with a much wider door opening than I’d had before. Much more open and accessible, but also much less private overall, despite the fact that my old cube was near a heavy traffic pattern.

I think I’ll enjoy my new digs, though. I just need to bring in the Goo-Gone and make the place smell like oranges while I’m making it not look quite so dingy.