surprise! i’m still here.

since my last post i:

– explored canada (well, montreal), traveled on a train for the first time, had a blast. didn’t get a chance to meet up with ocarina or damonk13, though. 🙁 cynicalscribe and i really enjoyed the trip by train, a lot less stress than driving. i injured my back when we were transferring trans in new york and was in pain for much of the ride up, though. booo. for valentine’s day we found a tintin-themed restaurant and went there to eat since how often do you get to say you’ve been to a tintin-themed restaurant (especially if you’re not in belgium!). photos of my trip are up here. we got to watch canada enter the olympics opening ceremony on a tv in a mcdonald’s down the street from our hotel while carrie was getting something to eat for dinner, and the rest of the ceremony after that on a french-language tv station (anything in english had french subtitles) when we got back to our hotel room. we didn’t get to do too many touristy-things since we were only there from friday through monday, and of the things we would have liked to see, one was closed for its yearly renovations (and closed even more days for elevator maintenance), and another had a labor strike closing it that particular weekend. but it was a nice trip, and only about $380 each for a roundtrip train ticket and 3 nights in the hotel.

– went to a winter gala for cynicalscribe‘s office, so we had to dress up nice. i still need to edit my photos from that. carrie won an award for having the best candy dish in the office, haha.

– renewed my membership at the local curling club. they’ve had so many new people sign up that i haven’t been able to get in any games, though. i’m scheduled to play in two breakfast-league games in april, but that’s about it.

– brewed my own beer. it’s pretty good for homebrew from a kit! i used maple syrup in it for flavor and alcohol content. it tastes better the longer it sits in its bottles, i think.

– got a ham radio license. why? just for kicks. how many people do you know that have a ham radio license? probably not many, if any at all. well, now you know at least one. the test was free to take (it used to be that the FCC would test you at their offices, but i guess they got tired of that and so now all the certification is done by other ham radio operators that have been accredited for testing – most clubs that do testing charge ~$14, but the local club does testing all across the country free of charge), but i still bought this book to study from and it was extremely helpful. so helpful, in fact, that i passed with 100% correct! it took me only about a week from the date i ordered my study guide until passing the test. they asked me if i wanted to test for the general-class license since i did so well, and even though i hadn’t studied for that one i figured it couldn’t hurt; i didn’t pass it, though. both of the tests were 35 questions, and you could get up to 9 wrong and still pass, but apparently i got 15 wrong on the general-class test. they said that i probably only need a little bit of studying to pass the general-class license, so i went ahead and ordered the general-class study guide to help me out. my callsign is KB3UFH. now all i need is a radio, haha… i already have a radio scanner, also purchased just for kicks. been listening to fire and ems and police and aircraft transmissions, also picking up other stuff that’s not as interesting like MTA public transit. 😛 most bizarre call i’ve heard has to have been the fire department dispatched to the kitchen in the chuck-e-cheese at the festival at riva shopping center.

– i’m thinking about going to boston next month. third sunday in each month from april through october is the MIT flea market. i’m still trying to figure out dates (do i want to leave after work on friday, or after work on thursday and take off all day on friday, or what), but if i take monday the 19th off then i can go to a game at fenway park, awesome. maybe i can score some ham radio equipment while i’m there, bahahah…

– i’m also thinking about going to japan in late may / early june. i still need to work out dates and figure out pricing and all, but i found out about a special deal that’s only good until the end of the month, so i need to figure that out asap.

– still doing graduate school. spring break just ended this past weekend and it’s been difficult getting back into the swing of things.

– went frisbee-throwing and had a picnic with cynicalscribe and bruno_boy this past weekend since the weather was so nice. photos of that still need to be edited too, like dave trying to stuff a whole hoagie in his mouth because “it ain’t a real picnic until someone tries to stuff a whole hoagie in their mouth.”

– updated my website; still need to change some stuff, but it’s HTML5 valid code that i hand-crafted myself, so that’s cool. 🙂

– passed 6000 miles on MINIkoma today.

– work has changed, as i mentioned in my last lj post. it’s not as bad as i thought it’d be. i’m doing a lot of work with SQL and actual stuff i’ve studied to do, so work definitely isn’t as much of a chore as it’s felt like in the past. my job now is to calculate and review and submit for processing payment requests… certain government contracts we have say we have to pay the government entity a particular percentage based on revenue or number of lines of service they have or something like that, it differs for each agency. my job is to run a query and generate a report that shows how much money we owe that agency for the month or quarter (depending on contract), put together a payment request, get it authorized, and send it for processing. some of these payments can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, too, and if we’re late on any of them then the customer that has that contract with us can say that we’re in default of our contract, pull all their lines and cancel their service and we won’t be able to work with them again, so it’s high-stakes stuff. i’m also supposed to try to streamline these processes to make it less labor-intensive. i’ve already fixed up one of them that used to take 6-8 hours and a bunch of manual number crunching and editing in excel, i’ve streamlined that one down to a few clicks of the mouse and set it up so it takes only about 1 hour tops from start to finish. makes me wish it were a payment increase, but since it’s something new and interesting to do it’s not that bad.

and that’s about it!

i heard that as of the beginning of the year there’s been a shakeup at work… well, not quite a shakeup, but a reorganization.

shortly after i started my systems analyst position that i started back in august, even before my soon-to-be manager returned from disability leave, her boss (our associate director) called me into his office and said that he figured that i’d be a better fit with this other guy as my manager so i could work on a different type of system instead. so almost straight off the bat i was working for someone who i didn’t know i’d be working for. (that’s not to say anything bad about my current manager, he’s been great. it’s just weird that the person who i thought was going to be my manager suddenly wasn’t my manager any more.)

since that meeting in early september, i’ve met my current manager twice. we’ve probably talked on the phone maybe a dozen times at most.

when i came to work last week, the guys on the team that i was initially going to be on told me that they were told their team wasn’t going to report up to the finance associate director any more and that instead of falling under the federal government umbrella, they were going to be under headquarters instead, and that their manager (who i had originally interviewed with) was going to be reporting to some director at HQ. my manager told me later that apparently the government team has been changed around to have different verticals for different industries, so that way each team would support a particular type of customer: “oh, you’re in health care? this team knows all about your needs.” or “you’re in public safety? this other team deals with public safety exclusively and knows exactly what you’d require.”, etc., etc.

here’s what i know so far:

my manager stays the same.

my associate director is now a director, and instead of reporting to the VP of government accounts, he is now a peer of the VP and reports to someone else instead.

my job title was “analyst – systems – reporting & analysis”, and i was in the “national government / federal accounts” team. that now changes to “analyst – enterprise & government – reporting & analysis”.

here was my previous job description:

Serve as point-of-contact and subject matter expert for desktop system processes, requirements and enhancements related to the National Government / Federal Accounts department. Performe system maintenance as necessary per end-user requests. Assist with user acceptance / bug testing of sales and customer service systems in development. Collaborate with Training, Communication and Operations departments to produce required support and reference materials.

here’s what i’m supposed to do now:

Act as focal point for financial and operational analysis, key performance indicator (KPI) and Internet reporting, and business case preparation. Gather, analyze and prepare daily, weekly and monthly KPI tracking, analysis and reports including orders, service level, training, receivables, quality assurance, attrition and related reports from data warehouse. Develop assumption tables and populate data for preparation of budget. Assist in the development and preparation of business cases to support funding of specified initiatives. Respond to requests from other centers, operations and finance departments.

is this something that i’m interested in doing? not really, no. though my manager says that we’re probably going to be creating dashboards for the finance team to use, i’d much rather be doing things that are more technical and less financial.

i’m trying to make up my mind for later this week if i want to take grad school this spring semester or take a leave of absence from school to try to find a different job. i can’t see myself going any farther up in the company at this point (especially in this position i’ve been shoehorned into whether i like it or not), and if i take off of school for a semester it’d give me more time to dedicate to job hunting.

bad news would be it’d delay my graduate degree by at least a semester.

when i complained before this shakeup that all i was really doing was sitting in on meetings a few times a week and taking notes of what went on, and that i wasn’t really given any sort of meaningful work, cynicalscribe pointed out that if i kept on and finished my master’s then it’d make me only more overqualified to sit in meetings and take notes. granted, sitting in on meetings and taking notes and not having any other sort of responsibility is nice, except 1) it’s BORING. i have to keep from falling asleep at my desk. and 2) not having much work to do means you could be expendable.

if i did continue with school this semester, and if i found a different job mid-semester and quit before this semester was up, it’d cost me $4440 to pay back work for the prepaid tuition for my two classes. actually, it’d cost me $8880, since i’d not only have to pay work back for their prepaid tuition, but pay out-of-pocket for the classes myself.

i told my manager on friday when he was talking about the reorganization about how i didn’t really have much to do and it sounded like he thought my team here was giving me more work to take care of, so it seemed like he was going to try to find something for me to work on but i’m not sure how likely that’ll be. ever since he told me weeks ago about how he was working on a ticketing system in coldfusion and that i might be able to take over maintenance/development of it, i’ve been learning coldfusion through our online tech library at work. still, boring.

i’d like to try to find something that can pay me more. i did some math recently and i can have all of my credit cards paid off by march, all of my student loans paid off by my 30th birthday (august 2012), and almost all (if not ALL) of my car loan paid off by the end of 2012. bad news? i’d be living in the basement at home when i’m 30. not good. it’d be tough to pay rent with a roommate even with just the car loan or just the school loans, never mind with both at the same time. (when i lived in the apartment, i had just recently paid off my car and didn’t have student loans in a repayment status at that time.)

and no matter how much i might try to pinch pennies, it’s impossible to thrift yourself into a bigger paycheck. so i need to find something that pays me more… i’m still annoyed that it wasn’t really much of a pay increase from my previous position to the analyst position back in august last year; even though it was a job title change, it was still within the same pay band, and it really wasn’t much of an increase at all.

i have to decide if i want to do the leave of absence by this friday, since saturday is the last day to register for spring classes and i’d like to make my decision before then. the reason why i can start thinking about this now is because i made it through 2009, meaning that i’m vested in my bonus for the year.

in other work news, we have an intern from virginia tech visiting us this week. apparently there’s a few other interns in our department, but this one is specifically to see what the systems team does. seems like a nice guy, but a little hard to communicate with him… he’s got a thick indian accent and speaks very softly and so it’s next to impossible to understand what he’s saying. i’d like to know whose bright idea it was at HR to send interns into the government department without having them sign nondisclosure agreements, though. at least we didn’t say (much) that could be proprietary system details, but the manager who was in charge of him didn’t think about this until after he had left; she called HR and then had a talk with us about what we can and can’t say to him… we can talk about what we do in general terms, we can’t show him anything onscreen since we’re working with customers’ accounts, we can’t discuss system changes or planned developments, and we can’t discuss timelines. so what’s the point of him interning here this week anyway? especially since his field of study is networking packets and transmission protocol, and not really systems development? so this week, we’ve been told to treat him like a visitor (since he is), and not tell him anything more than what we’d tell the UPS delivery guy if we happened to see him in the building. (but then again, our section is even more secured than the rest of the government department… other employees can’t even get into the government department unless they’re especially allowed to enter, and even government department employees can’t enter my section without having access, so again – whose idea was it to send interns in here without NDAs???)

i guess the whole point i’m trying to make here is… I… HATE… SAUERKRAUT! work’s a pain.