11 posts tagged “corporate america”
First I want to say that I love my job --as much as a guy who isn't trying to climb the corporate ladder but merely not fall off it can love his job. As I've said in the past, my co-workers think I'm a freak because I do not dread coming into the office each day.
That said, there are some hassles I have to put up with daily which, over time or at a tense moment, can make life more frustrating than I think it should. My company is located in the Federal Reserve Building, which is really just a giant piggy bank. To get in you have to show your badge to a guard and walk through a metal detector and sometimes, show your badge to another guard. Naturally you have to place your bag, keys, phone and just about anything else that could set the detector off on a conveyor belt to be scanned.
It's pretty routine for people who work in the building but there are always visitors who are behind the learning curve. They approach the metal detector and then realize that they have to put their bag on the belt. They slowly place it on the belt, oblivious to those behind them who are already prepared to put all their metal possession on the cart. Then the person walks through the detector and it goes off. Oh that's right, my cell phone has metal parts in it. They step back, toss their cell phone into the plastic container and place it on the belt and then move back into the detector -- if you could have moved like that when I was waiting to get to the conveyor belt I wouldn't be this frustrated -- and they jump in front of you to walk through the detector again. Guess what? That's right, it goes off again. Yep buddy, those keys you use to open your car and home, they are made of metal too.
On the other side of the metal detector are two revolving doors. You need your key card to enter. Everyone prefers to use the one closest to the metal detector they came through, even if it means waiting behind two other people. People will stand there, blocking those of us willing to walk 10 feet to the other revolving door. TEN FEET! You know these same people would step over their grandmother to move to a faster line at CVS or Jewel.
These are the same people who stand on escalators. Wouldn't want to use up any extra energy now because you might have to walk to the break room two or three times because you forgot a donut with your coffee.
Conversation with former co-worker last night on Instant Messenger:
CO-WORKER27: so how's it going?
CO-WORKER27: like it?
CO-WORKER27: better than C2?
ICARUS: it's going good
ICARUS: but so far, it's been orientation and training...the real work begins tomorrow
CO-WORKER27: ooooooh
ICARUS: however, I suspect that my worse day at this law firm will be better than my best day at C2
CO-WORKER27: that is AWESOME!
CO-WORKER27: no Menace like types?
ICARUS: My Menace is unique breed...the last one like her was killed when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her
CO-WORKER27: OMG! that was hilarious!
In the spring of 2007, I was given a new laptop at the No-Name Software company. It was part of the restructuring that took me off the documentation team and back on the phone support full time. I never bothered to fully build my machine because I was negiotiating with someone at the consulting firm about a position.
I got the offer, gave my notice and told all my friends during the weekend of Lincoln Square Mayfest (ironically in June). Then I turned in the laptop.
A few months ago, I was given a laptop to replace the one I had. Mine was leased and older and would be returned to the vendor. My new laptop was a co-worker's who got a better one and he wiped his before giving it to me. So I rebuilt it but didn't put all the required software on the machine because I knew I would be handing it back soon. I haven't told all my friends yet, but the fall counter part of the Lincoln Square Mayfest is German-American Fest and it was last weekend, on the day I got a job offer.
I'm leaving the consulting firm to go work for a large, pretitious law firm. It's larger than the one I was a paralegal at in the 90s. The position is a big step up in both pay and responsibility but it is definitely the direction I want to head (or at least think I want to head) toward in my career development.
I never expected to be at the consulting firm long enough to make partner or manager, though senior engineer would have been nice. Unfortunately, the way they run things made it impossible to survive, let alone thrive for me.
Ironically, I could never hope to succeed at my upcoming position if I were still at the No-Name Software company. I needed a transistion step to learn how things worked on the other side of the support call and that experience came from 15 months of consulting work. Who knew.
I've been in Miami on business this week. This is the second part of the March Assignment that kept me out of the Consulting firm offices and away from my Menace's influence. Not that she hasn't tried. Because of a taxi snafu, I missed my early morning flight and had to take a later one. I'm sure I have not heard the end of that one.
For the most part, It's been an even easier assignment than March in that since there are only a tenth as many users, there isn't a lot of floor support that is needed. The plan was to work during the day and party it up at night. Our hotel accommodations came with free access to a special guest lounge complete with an open bar happy hour from 5:30-7:30pm. Afterwards, we would head out to one of the scenic areas of Miami to have a good meal and perhaps find some myham.
One night we drank all the alcohol in the state of Florida. It is a miracle that I woke up alive and in time to make it to the office which convienently is next door to my hotel. One of my colleagues didn't make it and he was lucky that we were away from home and that our client also didn't make it in. If it had been me, my Menance would have sat upright in her Metra station -- Or should I say fall off her broom -- on the way to work, just knowing that something was amiss.
******
It hasn't all been on big party. There were some problems that required us to stay late Thursday, our last night to hit the town. It kinda took the wind out of our sails so we decided to have a last decent meal in South Beach and call it a night relatively early.
One of the things I hate about user support is that users tend to fixate on the symptoms and not the underlying cause. We worked late last night trying to fix the slowness that users have reported. So today my task was to check with them to see if they notice an improvement.
me: "we did some work last night and I wanted to see if you notice if things work faster today than yesterday."
user: "oh yeah it was really slow yesterday. Just before lunch I was trying to send a document so I opened up my email and addressed it and then I got a call from my sister who was telling me about her problem child Sarah, who's 12 and just discovering boys..."
Now I'm sitting in the Miami airport waiting for a flight back home. One of the clients is next to me. She provided a wireless access login so that we could pay with our laptops instead of engage in conversation. Since we've already spent the whole week together, some silence is in order so no complaints here.
I'm back in the office next week. I'm not looking forward to it for a variety of reasons, including being expected to get back into Anal-Retentive Consultant Mode immediately. If I survive that week, I get to do this all over again the following week in Ft Lauderdale.
My two week assignment has come to an end and it is with both sadness and relief. Sadness in that I had just got use to a steady, consistent start and finish time and getting to eat lunch. And I certainly will miss the free coffee and fruit. And I've even made a chat buddy or two. But it is also a relief because user support does get old after a while.
When I was asked to leave the law from that squandered my twenties, I tried to hide in plain sight. i got a job at a dotcom on the other side of downtown and went to great lengths to avoid running into anyone from the firm.
The dotcom went boom and I got the gig at the no-name software company. I recall once walking down a particular street to get to the Old St Pat's block party and dreading when I got near the building.
Eventually, I started recontacting some of the friends from the firm to let them know I had landed on my feet and we talked about staying in touch. Of course that didn't really happen because of the usual reasons and because I was now among my own people "computer geeks" and "runners" and people closer to my age.
In the nineties, I spent the majority of my twenties working at a downtown law firm. If there is such a thing as a healthy, nurturing environment for a person starting out in Corporate America , this place was the polar opposite. Somehow, I did manage to survive and even thrive there for a long time though at the price of my youth. Eventually, I learned that the life of a litigation paragal was not for me and I went back to school for a master's in computer science.
My latest assignment places me across the street from the very place I squandered my twenties. Everytime I look out a window that faces West, it's like I see the Death Star looming in the distance. For a long time, because of that mistake, I avoided that building and that part of town.
The great thing about this assignment is that it provides a level of consistency. I'm at the same place doing the same thing from 9-5 each day. The bad thing is that some days do not move as quickly as others. It's also irking my Menace back at Core Command that she cannot touch me for the month of March because this is an important client and I cannot be pulled because I know a particular software product better than the more seasoned engineers back at the ranch.
In the short lived series Daybreak, Detective Brett Hopper (Taye Diggs) lives the same day over and over. Each morning when he wakes up, Hopper writes down things he remembers from the previous iterations of his day so that he can skip to the next step. Since joining the Consulting Firm, my life has been a little bit like Hoppers. Between long hours at work and trying to get my marathon training in either before work or after, I don't have a lot of free time before I go to bed to get personal things done. So sometimes at work, I'll open up notepad on my laptop or jot on a real piece of paper, things I have to try and finish before I got to bed.
It's kinda of a tug of war. My job keeps interfering -- directly and indirectly -- with my non-work life and I keep insisting on having a life outside the office so I have to keep coming up with ways to work around or subvert the system as necessary.
This week my schedule has been the most relaxed its been in a while. The only conflict came Monday when I had to stay late to work on an upgrade. Even though we ran into a setback, the upgrade would have been finished in enough time for me to go to a very late spin class at my gym, except one of the partners who wanted to be part of the upgrade didn't get off the phone until 5:30, which pushed everything back a half an hour.
Not a huge deal although I think I really could have used a spin class to squeeze the last of the lactic acid out of my legs from Sunday's 20 mile run. On the other hand, it was a struggle getting out of bed yesterday to hammer out a measily 5 miles and this morning my body wouldn't let me get out of bed. Between the cold and the disrupted sleep schedule, my body needed more bed time and less running time, so I complied. That's part of the give and take that it takes to train -- sometimes you have to force yourself to put on the running shoes and sometimes you have to let yourself slack off a little.
A little over a month ago at the office, I had a sitdown clear the air lunch with my Mentor and my Menance. As with most clear the air sort of meetings, it really wasn't intended to be an all out bitch-grip-moan meeting. Instead, all the right things were said and a gentle cease-fire was called between the Menance and me.
Since then, it has been more enjoyable to go into the office. There are still aspects of the job that annoy me and it wouldn't be called work if it was easy, but at least I don't dread coming into the office as much as I use to. I've even found better ways to balance my work and outside life. I've figured out how to get to the office by 8:30am almost consistently thanks to the speed of the Blue Line. It's only when the snow is so bad that I don't want to move my car that I'm forced to use the slower Brown line and have to remember to allow more time.
If I do have to drive somewhere for work, then I pack my workout bag along with my laptop so that I can either hit the gym after work or even find a trail to get a run in. Lately, I've even managed to do more and more of my training in the AM, leaving my evening free for either working a little late or anything but squeezing a run in before bedtime. It helps that it starts getting lighter earlier now and its a little warmer so I'm not striving to stay under my warm covers as long as possible.
There are some tricks that I've learned, both on my own and from the other engineers, to kinda subvert the system.
For example, we pretty much work until 5pm or later. There is no going home if you finish an assignment early, unless you happen to be so far from the office that the time it takes to come back is greater than for you to just go home. This prompts smart engineers to wait until it's closer to 5 pm to report that they are finished at a site for the day.
Another example is installing updates. These are typically scheduled for after hours because you have to reboot servers and it's usually not possible to do so during the day. Typically, you are at the site before hand doing a system health check. If you do it By-the-Book, you would start downloading the updates at 5pm, install them, reboot the server and then check for new updates. This can keep you very late.
A smart engineer, especially one who knows the site, will start downloading the Windows Updates before 5pm and even install them so that at 5pm all they have to do is reboot the server. Sometimes you are lucky and you can restart some of the servers because no one is logged into the applications they are running. It can make the difference between getting out the door by 5:15 instead of 6:15 pm.
These are the minor tricks for managing my day that I've learned in the short time I've been at the Consulting Firm. I'm sure the more senior engineers have even more ways to work the system.
The last remnants of my cold are finally fleeing my body. I haven't had a coughing or sneezing fit in over 48 hours and I can breathe through my nose again. Even without running much last week, I managed to lose some weight; the scale read 189.5 today, which is probably just temporary, but I'll try to build on it. I want to be as close to 190 lbs (or less) as possible for my next marathon.
This week I have to once again tweak my training to make up for last week's missed runs. Usually you just let the missed runs go but I was really looking forward to last week's tempo run -- as much as one can look forward to a speed workout -- so this week I will do tempo runs on Monday and Thursday with an easy recovery run on Wednesday. That's the plan anyway, always subject to weather and work.
Today I was an assignment in the northwestern suburb of Buffalo Grove. It didn't take long to get there in the AM, but because of the late afternoon snow -- a few snowflakes when compared to the storms that have hit us in previous weeks -- traffic grinded to a crawl. It didn't help that in typical consultant fashion, the day went from looking like I would get out early to having to stay late. I got on the road at 5:20, was on the expressway by 5:35 and was cruising along until I ran into the parking lot that is the 94-Edens.
I could have got home by 6:30 had I the good sense to just go straight home. But because I wanted to get in a decent tempo run, I spent another 30-40 minutes driving to my gym so I could run on an indoor track and not be at the mercy of slippery paths or cold winds. While stretching, I ran into my favorite Spin Class instructor. She was totally cool that I wasn't gonna be in her class tonight.
The track requires 8 laps for one mile and I've learned to use my old timex chrono-watch to count my laps so I don't lose track of which lap I'm on. Unless I'm absolutely pressed for time, I still try to do a warmup and cooldown mile in addition to the tempo or speed workout of the day. This means I'm running around that track a lot and seeing the same people over and over. Tonight there was one particular girl I didn't mind seeing. She had long dark hair and a very nice body to boot. She was mostly walking around the track although she did do some short laps or sprints. She also did a lot of ab work between sets. Most of the time she had her hair in a pony tail, but sometimes she would let her hair down.
With my last half mile (plus cooldown) to go, I was going to say to her "hey leave your hair up...it's too distracting otherwise and I'm trying to focus here," but i figured she wouldn't hear me with her iPod on. It turns out that was her last trip around the track and she left, though I did see her later having a snack with her friends in the gym's dining area. They all looked about 17 or 18 -- college students at DePaul without any of the cares that weigh down on us older folk.
There wasn't much going on tonight that I was interested in participating in on a cold sub-zero night in Chicago. So it didn't bother me too much that I had to work until 6:30 pm. But dammit don't I wish I had someone to talk to right now. I'm cut off from my RCYA-friends -- the ones that I do get along with -- because I just won't go to Lincoln Square or any of the events that I might run into Judas and Jezebel at. I only see my running friends on the weekend and we go our separate ways after brunch.
This is hard. I really don't care so much that So-Suede and Angela got together; she and I were not a good fit and we only tried dating for like 5 minutes. But it just feels like women always prefer him for some reason and it is never going to be my turn. There are still a lot of good things going on in my life but I really need something good to happen on the romance front because I don't know how much longer I can go on. And so it doesn't help when I work late and realize that I'm going home to no one and time keeps passing by. I begin to worry that I've spent so much time training for marathons that I've missed out on the important things in life.
But then I go for a run like I did tonight when I finally got home at 7pm. It was only a 3 mile run in the freezing cold but my mood changed from wanting to cry to simply wanting to improve my situation. I have to find a way to be happier and project contentment with my life. And that is hard right now because even though things are better at work these last two weeks -- because the powers that be ordered the Wicked Witch of Oak Park to be nice to me least they get sued for creating a hostile work environment -- it's only a temporary Détente.
