Monday, January 22, 2007
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Small mercies
Well the holidays and my birthday are (mercifully) over. There's nothing like your first holiday season in a new strange place to really make you feel a little bit lost. I really don't mind the getting older thing, I think it's just more fun to commemorate doing so when there are a lot of people you love around to tell you how glad they are that you were born. Yuck.
Anyway, the job is going great! They just did annual reviews and I did better than I expected by quite a lot. One of the comments that I got wasn't entirely unexpected, but it did shock me that my boss picked up on it. To paraphrase, he basically said that I had a glue-like effect between otherwise warring factions in the shop. It's my one talent really, so I exploit the hell out of it. My boss is this very ones-and-zeroes kind of geek and I think I was very surprised that either he'd picked that out or that I had been less than subtle about it. Perhaps in my desire to fit in an my lack of confidence in my technical skills (which admittedly, I usually underestimate), I went a tad overboard? It was still nice to hear though.
Last week and this week I've been sent to a series of 4 SQL classes. Wow. That's 6 classes in 3 months. 5 of those have been actual Microsoft curriculum. It's interesting to compare how contractors are treated when the company has a budget for the project. I'd really like to get back to my college work, but I'm still scrambling a little bit not to look like an idjit at work, so it may be another semester before I can really get back in the swing. Darn. And in the mean time, at least I'm not stagnating!
Anyway, the job is going great! They just did annual reviews and I did better than I expected by quite a lot. One of the comments that I got wasn't entirely unexpected, but it did shock me that my boss picked up on it. To paraphrase, he basically said that I had a glue-like effect between otherwise warring factions in the shop. It's my one talent really, so I exploit the hell out of it. My boss is this very ones-and-zeroes kind of geek and I think I was very surprised that either he'd picked that out or that I had been less than subtle about it. Perhaps in my desire to fit in an my lack of confidence in my technical skills (which admittedly, I usually underestimate), I went a tad overboard? It was still nice to hear though.
Last week and this week I've been sent to a series of 4 SQL classes. Wow. That's 6 classes in 3 months. 5 of those have been actual Microsoft curriculum. It's interesting to compare how contractors are treated when the company has a budget for the project. I'd really like to get back to my college work, but I'm still scrambling a little bit not to look like an idjit at work, so it may be another semester before I can really get back in the swing. Darn. And in the mean time, at least I'm not stagnating!
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