dianaschnuth

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.

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.