P2P

Change is a-Comin’

The thing about a blog is it’s therapy for me.  But then when I need it most, I can’t use it.  And I hate when people don’t and/or can’t share their heart on their blog when they’re hurting most.  Being there for one another in our times of need is when the blogging community means the most.  I guess it’s its own worst enemy.  Because sometimes blogging and real life clash and you just can’t blog what you want.  But let me say change is coming for us.

I can say our youth pastor resigned this week.  I can say I’m hurt.  And I can say my manager announced four people on my team at work including me may not have a job as of December 31.  And really that’s probably all you need to know to figure out my heart hurts and I’m stressed and I could probably write another book about all of it.

Please pray.

Weekend Recap

Friday night Heather and I took the girls with us to Longhorn to eat.  Scott worked all weekend and Mom and Dad had just gotten in from Dominican Republic when we sat down to eat.  We spent the rest of the evening at Mom’s preparing for a yard sale at Mom’s Saturday morning. I decided to stay at Mom’s hoping I wouldn’t have to get up as early and the kids could sleep in.  No such luck. Both got up with me around 6:30.  The yard sale was great for Heather and Dad while I only pulled out with $53.  Apparently books and children’s clothes were low on the priority list.

Saturday afternoon we went to our town’s SpringFest.  The best part of that was the Moon Pie Strawberry Shortcake.  Delish.  Saturday evening we went to see my niece in her ice skating recital.  It was the cutest thing ever.  The girls and I spend the rest of the evening at home enjoying the gorgeous weather we’re having.  But I was really tired from my super early morning and went to bed as soon as I watched Dollhouse after the kids went to bed.

Today church did not get out until 1.  And ILs had thing at church to do so we went to get Scott at home and ate at Wendy’s even though I’m so tired of eating out.  This afternoon I have spent getting ready for my business trip to Indy for the week.  Washing clothes, packing, making lists for Scott, printing tickets and itinerary, etc.

Neither of the girls want me to go but I know they will do fine.  Scott is off until Thursday night and Mom is planning to keep them.  I know I will miss them and my days or going to be early and long.  But I am looking forward to my king-size bed in my own room WITH wireless.  Yeah, baby!  And now all I’m trying to decide what I’ll do on my flight…write my own book, read Heaven on my Kindle or listen to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs I just downloaded.  Hmmm…what to do?

The Morning After

So last night I didn’t get to bed until 4:30.  And as soon as I finally laid (lay?) down, I get a call with an issue.  So I get back up and find that’s something that can wait and I’m asleep by 5am.  School was canceled and Scott is off so he got up with the girls when they got up.

At 9:30, my cell phone rings and a somewhat panicked manager is on the phone.  There are problems.  And indeed, something did slip by me but it’s fixable.  I’m able to fix it within the next two hours.  At that point, I need to be on a call at 1 which now I’m finished with but working on some other things that need checked.  I also need to be around at 6pm to check some jobs that will run. I’m feeling tired but ok.  I’ve survived on less sleep than this.  They don’t call me a Work at Home MOM for nothing.

And just to continue my random streak, I’m getting ready to drink a cup of the best coffee EVER.  Thanks to  Jake and Jill for introducing us.

What I do and how I work from home

I’ve had a few questions about what I do and what the heck WAHM means.  I figure today is as good as any to give a history of what I do for my job for those that don’t already know.

How I work from home

I graduated from Winthrop with a Computer Science degree.  I think I might have been the only female in all of my programming classes.  If not, then only one of very few.  I ended up being the president of our UPE (geekiest of geek club) and graduated with honors.

My dad is in the programming field and he got me an interview with one of his previous contracting companies.  Because of him and my three years of experience at my internship, I was hired as a programmer for a small shipping company in Charlotte.  I stayed there 6 months working on a Visual Basic application.

After that, I spent several weeks “on the bench” and then got a contract with the large bank I’m still with.  When I first started, I worked 40 hours per week and went into the office.  After I had Emma 3 years later and Scott was in academy, I simply couldn’t handle it all.  I asked to go part-time.  I worked from the office Tues-Fri 7 hours a day.

When June came and we were moved to Columbia.  I was going to quit but we were in the middle of a project and they asked me to finish the project from Columbia at home.  A few weeks went by and the project finished but the working from home thing was working out so well, I just kept doing.  We would travel back to see my parents and I would go into the office when were in town about twice a month.

A year later when we moved back, I was pregnant with Lexi and no one ever made me come into the office.  It’s now been over4 years since we’ve been back.  I now work 6 hours a day Mon-Fri, adjusting my logged-on hours to try to accommodate the kids’ schedule.

It gets tricky when there are conference calls.  I’ve been known to hide in closets, bathroom, bedrooms and the garage to try to get a quiet spot.  I’ve also sat at kids’ tables and on the floor with my laptop to try to multi-task.  It hasn’t always been easy but it’s been worth it and it’s gotten easier.

What I do

As for what I actually do when I’m filling my WAHM shoes…my job has changed over the years as technology has changed. I started out strictly as programming on a specific project with Visual Basic.  Since then, I’ve done ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Java, Oracle, SQL Server, blah, blah, blah to most of you. I’ve moved into more of a production support/technical analyst who gets to program every once in a while.  If you want to get really technical, this is what I actually do…(technical details have changed to protect the company)

I write SQL like this:

INSERT INTO FUMON.EVENT_REQS (SELECT  (SELECT ELEMENT_ID FROM FUMON.RULE_ELEMENTS
WHERE RULE_TYPE_ID = 38 AND RULE_ELEMENT_VALUE = 7 AND RULE_VALUE_DESC = ‘AGE’), EVENT_TYPE_ID, OPERATOR_CODE, CREATE_DATE ,CREATED_BY ,LAST_UPDATE_DATE ,
DELETED_FLAG, LAST_UPDATED_BY FROM FUIMON.EVENT_REQS WHERE ELEMENT_ID IN (99=0)) ;

Process XML files like this:
<AP>
<INDORORG>I</INDORORG>
<LICTYPE>A</LICTYPE>
<RESIDENT>Y</RESIDENT>
<EFFDATE>20020116</EFFDATE>
<PENDINGDATE>20020107</PENDINGDATE>
<TERMINATIONDATE>99991231</TERMINATIONDATE>
<APSTATUS>A</APSTATUS>
<LINEOFINSURANCE>NNYYNYNYNNNNN</LINEOFINSURANCE>
<CLIENTNR>9</CLIENTNR>
<CARRIERNAIC>65005</CARRIERNAIC>
<RENEWALDATE>20090101</RENEWALDATE>
<DONOTRENEW>N</DONOTRENEW>
</AP>

Create pretty pictures like this:

And then write all the programs to make that pretty picture happen.  It’s a very geeky, technical, detailed job but when I actually get to do what I’m supposed to do, I love it.

Work, work, work, work

I don’t blog about work often.  Self-preservation and all but today is a big work day.  Those 2 pages represent about 7 months of work from a group of about 10 people.  All of the stuff in that picture is what I’m helping do in a span of about 48 hours.  All the pink, I’m personally responsible for and represents probably another list of ten things to do.

I supposedly had one task at 4am this morning but got a call our vendor was running behind schedule (what’s new) so I “slept in” until 6 before I got up to check my email for updates.  I ended up staying up to do some blogging I didn’t do last night since I actually forced myself to go to sleep early.  I also had the girls to school early and was able to start working on my tasks in between.

Today is a little bit of hurry up and wait but my last task is at 2am tonight with the bulk of it happening between 6pm and 10pm.  So, I’m in for a very long work day.

Corporate Fun

I went to the office today for a SEVEN hour meeting with a vendor which thank goodness only turned into 5 hours with free breakfast and lunch.  I didn’t have to talk too much and what I had to talk about, I knew like the back of my hand so no stress.  So I amused myself by playing a little game.  I realized this one project manager was using lots of corporate jargon so I just started writing a few phrases down.  And now I’m going to share real phrases spoken by real project managers in a really big American corporation.

we’ll take a waterfall approach
we need the learned resources
how feasible
get efficiencies from this process
based on early transition
how granular we want to get
throw the balls in the air and try to balance them

I wish I would have started from the beginning, I would have had many comic strip starters for Dilbert.

Fantastic news

My medical insurance doesn’t start with the new company until March 1.  COBRA for the family was quoted to me at $1,100/month!!!  If you are only going to miss coverage for 60 days or less, you can opt out but then sign up and retro pay if something bad happens.  However, mine will be almost 90 days so up until this morning I thought we were going to have to pay over 3K for insurance over the next three months. 

Ouch.  That hurts even thinking of it. 

But thankfully I had Scott call the highway patrol HR office and we can opt into their cheapest state plan (around $200 a month) within 31 days from today since there was  loss of coverage and then cancel everything within 31 days after March 1.  So yay, that’s over 2K just saved.  And we still have our Health Savings Account with money in it from my high deductible plan with my old (as of tomorrow) company.

I quit

Literally.  I turned in my resignation today to my consulting company.  It felt very, very strange to be writing that email.  And to me it was very odd that in these days, you can quit simply by a few sentences in an email.  I kept thinking I needed to hand write a letter on letterhead and mail it in and then sign about 25 papers.  And it felt weird just because I’ve never officially resigned from a company.  Sure I’ve quit other jobs but not really like this.  I worked with that company since the day I was out of college over seven years ago and it just feels like another first I’m just now having.  I don’t know. 

The good news is although I turned in my resignation, I have a very, very nice new deal awaiting me that starts in a few weeks and I’m looking forward to it.  I’ve heard from several credible sources that the company takes care of their people and it should be a pleasure to work with them.  If the numbers say anything, we’ll get along just fine.

Another Bad Monday

What is with bad Mondays?  Today is really bad though. I caught FIL’s stomach virus but seemed to have tamed it by lunchtime with some meds.  However, I’ve only eaten some toast and I’m hungry, weak and now I have a headache on top of my stomach ache.  The girls are doing ok since I’m letting them watch a lot of TV and I hand fed both of them their lunch just so they wouldn’t be whiny because of hunger the rest of the afternoon.  Work is not good though.  Another production issue today that is causing me grief.  Today is the type of day that makes me want to quit work.

In a ray of hope, I got all the proposals today from the consulting companies and it looks favorable for me.  Just need to choose which one.

Early Day

We got an email from my manager that everyone was signing off by 2pm.  Yay!

Great news on the work front

I just got word that my contracting company basically came out and said they could not work out something for me and said I could look at other companies to see if they can help me.  Which in the contracting world that’s almost unheard of.  They could sue me if for doing that if they wanted to get nasty.  So yay, I have two other companies lined up right now to present me with packages and I just get to pick the best one.  And both should include that 14% raise I was supposed to get.  Whoo Hoo!  Thank you, Jesus!

Back to the office tomorrow

For the third time in about a week, I’m going into the office to work tomorrow.  No access to this site while I’m there .

The rest of tonight will be spent watching tv.  I may get in a post about The Bachelor before I zonk out.  I doubt it though.  I’m really tired tonight.

News on the work front

So good news and bad news. 

The bad news is my client can not meet the demands of my contractor to increase my pay rate enough to let me have some and actually get that raise they want to give me.  It’s really ridiculous.  So, I might be on the hunt for a new contracting company.  I hope it works out because depending on how stubborn my contracting company wants to get, it could get really nasty.

As for the good news, I’ve been informed I have to decide by tomorrow what vacation I’m taking for the rest of the year and I have 63 hours to take.  In my world, that’s 10.5 days.  So I’m going to take next Monday off since my client company has it off even though my contracting company doesn’t.  Then I’m taking off December 20-January 1.  That means after this week I have two short weeks this month and then only have to work 2.5 weeks until 2008.  Yay!

No Amy Tomorrow

I’m headed to work in the morning.  Yes, I know, same ‘ol, same ‘ol for a lot of you.  And I work every day too but normally it’s in the comfort of my sunroom at home and tomorrow I’ll be headed up to the "big city" to the office to work.  And just last week my domain got put on the big no-no firewall list and I can’t view any of my site from the network.  So until about 5pm tomorrow, I will not have access to my site.  This will be a record I think  and I’m really not looking forward to it.  AT.  ALL.  Especially since I’m enjoying SO MANY of you commenting to enter my giveaway and I’m just lovin’ seeing it all come in and visiting your sites.  So, it’s almost 1AM and I am going to be TIRED tomorrow at work.  So Adios for now.

My jobs

Google is not cooperating but I once heard that a person changes careers 7 times in their lifetime.  Maybe I’m way off on that because I have a lot of jobs left to do if that’s the case.  So far in my life, these are the jobs I’ve held.

1. I worked a few times at a movie rental place but I was fired because I wouldn’t work the Christmas holiday.  Their loss. I could have been a fabulous DVD checker outer.
2. I worked at a ice cream parlor.  I was named the Banana Split Queen and I still have a strong right arm from scooping the frozen ice cream.
3. I worked for a realtor as an assistant.  I worked mainly on her flyers.  I also worked for the real estate as the secretary on Saturdays.  But I did everything from balancing her checkbook, getting her car washed, licking envelopes to making copies of contracts.
4. I worked as an intern at a paper manufacturer.  I was a developer there.  Did some small stuff in Access but actually learned some top-notch object-oriented programming there.
5. My first job out of college was a IT consultant as a developer and I’ve only had two contracts.  One for 6 months for a small shipping company that was based out of Lebanon and this one for 6 1/2 years for a large financial company.

So that’s it.  Five jobs total and two of them in the same field.  Wonder what else I’ll do…