Archive for the ‘Career’ Category
I’m in a new season of work right now, where my current full-time job is…to find a new job. There are several really great things about this season (that I’ll refer to as the Jonquinox):
- Most of my work is done from home
- I can stay unshowered and in my PJ’s until noon (or later unless I’m expecting a delivery from Papa Johns)
- My dry cleaning bill has gone from $65 a month to zero
- I can listen to my “Rapilicious” playlist on Spotify with wild abandon and absolutely no fear of humiliation or ridicule (check it out if you’re connected to me on Spotify)
- I can gag the cat with duct tape when it makes catty remarks about my rapping, and there’s nobody here to call the ASPCA (Oops – did I just give myself away?)
- I can insensitively and with no guilt refer to the cat as an “it” because it’s been spayed and is now neither a “he” or “she”
- I have unlimited access to all the yummy Dunkin Donuts coffee I can drink, with no one here to criticize when I suddenly jump out of my chair to break dance ̶̶ or to power-walk from one end of the house to the other while singing the new Luke Bryan song in a twangy falsetto
But, along with all these great Jonquinox benefits, there are some challenges:
- There’s no one here to annoy when I’ve completed my fifth cup of Dunkin Donuts (annoying the cat is no fun once the gag is in place)
- An odor of onions and feet seems to follow me wherever I go in the house, and I’ve not been able to locate the source
- I’m beginning to OD on peanut butter and butter sandwiches (we ran out of jelly and I just didn’t feel like getting dressed to go buy some more)
- The exercise of clarifying my career goals, defining my passions, and researching opportunities has led me down some very interesting paths, some of which are probably not practical (such as cruise director and personal trainer)
What name would you give to your current season of life and why?
This morning I received my third ID badge in a year and a half. It’s been quite an ugly journey through this process (see this prior post for the beginning of the story). And by ugly I mean that my badge pictures have been uglier than a hemorrhoid-suffering baboon in heat. I don’t think it’s so much that I’m ugly (we can debate that – but you’ll lose), it’s that the Einsteins at my company who create the cards don’t know how to crop the pictures appropriately. The natural consequences are grossly out of proportion uggo pics. No one will ever mistake these for glamour shots. And if they do, the comments will always be prefaced with, “Bless his/her heart…”
So what caused me to take another run at the badge situation? Two things, really:
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[Most names have been altered to protect the identity of the individuals in this embarrassing story.]
I worked for a mid-size technology distribution and services company in Phoenix, Arizona in the mid-90’s. The company hired a new Chief Information Officer in 1995 and I survived the inevitable reorg, landing a spot on the CIO’s lead team of direct reports.
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I’m really not much of a fan of meetings. I’d much rather collaborate in smaller groups in a more informal setting. Why? Because most meetings are ridiculously unproductive and waste the valuable time I’ve reserved for drinking coffee and checking email and Facebook. In general, the most annoying meetings include some of the following characteristics.
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If you’re at all active on Facebook, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get friend requests from some of the people you work with. Consider all of the costs before you accept the invitation into their sordid private lives.
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