Today’s schedule was brought to you by the letter S as in sh**show. I normally do chiro on Friday mornings, and since Andrea had an early morning appointment, I moved my chiro even earlier (7:30). Except I had trouble sleeping so dragging my butt out of bed to get there was not a pleasant experience.
Unfortunately, part of my back is being stubborn and refusing to release, so I take what I can get. Anyway, onward to a different appointment for Andrea and then back home. Series of meetings, staff meeting, and then out the door at noon to go to the telescope store. I know, you wouldn’t think that was work, but it kind of was. I was having them evaluate two donated scopes for our astronomy group, and so I took them in today. Two hours later, I had a wonderful time, but needed to be doing my real job. Grabbed some Tim Horton’s on the way for Jacob and I, ate quickly, and then off to a conference call at 2:30.
Then I had to double down on a whole bunch of taskings as I’m off next week from Monday to Wednesday. Yay me, boo stacking work requests so my team is busy. And then I realized that a simple project that I half-volunteered for can’t wait until I’m back, they’ll need it before then. So I had to do a ton of work to get it into a form that was shareable. Imagine 3 hours to send a doc by email with all the info together ready to be used.
Somewhere around 7:30, I realized I hadn’t heard any noise upstairs. Andrea had fallen asleep, and Jacob hadn’t eaten. I ran out and grabbed subs for us as it was too late to start thinking about home solutions with what we have in the fridge right now, and also realized that while I was binging work, Jacob basically spent the day all by himself again. FFS.
We have got to get our sh** squared away. That is not on.
So we hung out for an hour with him, played a game and then he was too tired to keep going. Not surprisingly.
For me? It was back to work. Another couple of hours and I have everything up, out, tasked, noted, planned, tweaked, filed, and my out of office is on. Somewhere around midnight. It was a long day. And I did all this so I can relax and take three days off without thinking about it. If I live long enough to enjoy it. F***.
I have been fighting a bug for a few days, a bit of congestion, a bit of a headache, a sore throat and the gastro issues I self-inflicted on Sunday messed up my sleep last night. I have been super active in the last few days, so I should have slept like a log according to the logic of my mother. I can even hear her voice saying it.
Instead, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. Tossed and turned, tried to go to the washroom without success, back to bed, another 90 minutes of staring at the ceiling metaphorically, back to the washroom with success, and finally crashed back to sleep around 6:00 I guess.
Woke up at 9:00 feeling like a zombie. Things have improved generally over the weekend, and my sore throat was mostly gone but my digestive issues were going batty, my congestion was back, and my CPAP machine gave me an air pressure headache to start the day. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t COVID-serious, just an annoying bug of some kind. But I decided to crash and take the day.
Andrea might have the same bug as of late tonight. Hopefully, she’ll do her normal great job of kicking it quickly. I have a bunch of stuff tomorrow for work, so I’ll definitely be “back”, but I might push a few meetings to later in the week and focus on the core duties.
As I mentioned earlier in these posts, Jacob has various courses that he is trying to do at OutSchool.com. He’s enjoying them, but then again, there’s no real work involved. He has some reading to do for one of them, but it’s about Gods, and he would read that anyway!
Today was a full day for him. While I was working this morning, he played Fortnite and then had a call with a social worker, upgraded from phone to Zoom (yay!) and he thought it was nice to be able to see her, so we’ll count that as a win. Personally, I think it’s a HUGE win for him, but that’s just me.
I ran over to Tim Horton’s for lunch, took a break for that, and then back to work for me. He then had a class this afternoon on mythology in general or Greek Gods specifically, I forget which, and then chess lessons. But after that? I took another break so I could sit with him and do Lego.
We’re working on a project, I’ll likely add it to my choices tomorrow (assuming we finish), so I won’t reveal the content yet, but we are assembling it together. Originally, I was going to do it by myself, a special project just for me, but since he’s struggling a bit on the isolation front, we made him my assistant for it. Normally, I man the book and he assembles stuff, but for this one, it was supposed to be me assembling and him manning the book. Until today when he was getting impatient and wanted to be in there with his hands. So I let him take over. He needed it, and it’s a small price to pay. I have lots of other projects I’m working on in other ways.
Then I came back down to work while Jacob did some reading, I got caught up on a few transactions going through, returned a couple of calls I needed to follow up on, and then it was dinner time. We’ve been eating a lot of leftovers this week in different forms to use stuff up, so it was relatively quick to make fajitas tonight and we’ll likely have it again for lunch tomorrow.
After that, I introduced Jacob to the comic stylings of Tim Allen in the form of Galaxy Quest. I was debating Spaceballs vs. GQ, but GQ has a storyline that is more fun than just jokes, and we did just watch Guardians of the Galaxy, so it seemed like a “save the universe”-type theme. He loved it! I had forgotten a scene where they beam the rock giant onto the ship to fight the invaders, it was fun.
And then? Bedtime for penguins, and I came back downstairs to work a bit more. I’m trying to finish a workplan for my team, and I had about seven or eight inputs to wade through for possible inclusion, so it wasn’t just copy and paste or tweak. Ironically, I got it all done, ready to send to my team for a 10:00 a.m. meeting tomorrow, and realized I forgot to include one of the files I’m doing these days myself.
An odd work day…sort of 9:00-11:45, 1:00-3:45, 5:00-6:30 and then 9:30-10:45 or so. Yeah, a little more than my 7.5h I guess, but who knows if there were production lags from start/stop too. Either way, it made the day “work” for being with Jacob. It would be good to have longer “shifts” in there, but it worked.
In the words of my 7-year-old son, I’m a weirdo pants. And if you look at the way I’m currently managing my career, that might be an appropriate characterization. I took a job 9 years ago in my current branch, and for the first year or so, I was the manager of performance measurement. Then I started a five-year process of “big scary projects” on top of my regular job, often as the sole branch rep involved in it, and the rest of my job kind of moved to the corner of my desk at times. I kept things going, but just based on time and intense focus, the projects were far more important to my work plan than my day-to-day files. Then we reorganized, my director left, I acted for a while, and then I took over as manager for our corporate planning team, subsuming my job as manager for performance measurement, and I’ve been doing that new combined job more or less for the last three years.
So three years ago, I thought, “six years is enough”, and planned to move on. Except I had a great boss and new files. So I stayed. Then two years ago, I thought, “Okay, time to move on”, except again, there was no real incentive. Good boss, good work/life balance, good files, and I stayed. Just over a year ago, I was like, “Okay, time to REALLY move on”, but I didn’t. Sure, I had to get my French renewed first, but even with that in hand, I haven’t been embracing the job hunt. And, honestly, why would I?
I report directly to an EX-03 who gives me a lot of autonomy. I interact regularly with all the DGs and ADMs, and they like my work. Nobody is telling me to fix what isn’t broken, I gained some new financial experience in the last year, I have a great team to work with, the work balance has been good, and I am both good at my job and enjoy it. So why leave? Because I threw my hat in the ring last year for a promotion to get a specific job, and when I updated my résumé, I had to add coverage for the last two years — and I only changed six words.
Never, in my entire career, has that happened. I have always had new files, new projects, new SOMETHING / ANYTHING that kept the renewal constant. But, here I was, now 9 years in the same “box”, and no real change in files or initiatives in the last 3 years. I could have invented stuff to talk about, or rather blew up a few things just to look different, but that’s not the point. It wasn’t how to spin it to look bigger, it was that it wasn’t ACTUALLY different. So I talked to my boss, we started a search for a replacement, and we even posted the job in March for applicants to pose their candidacy.
Why is that weird? Because I have no idea what job I am going to do next.
It’s true, I don’t know. And if the first question out of everyone’s mouth is, “Where are you going?”, the second that quickly follows is, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”. Because NOBODY does that. You find a new job, you quit your old one, they hire a replacement, maybe there’s a gap to cover. But I agreed that I would “train” my replacement although it is more about transfer over of some corporate knowledge than it is “training”. And my boss asked for a month, and that seemed fine. Plus I’m finishing my french.
So she’s interviewing my replacements last week and this, and I haven’t even really looked too hard to find something. Some by laziness, some by agreement, but some of that was by intentional design. Most of the people I’m going to talk to are more senior, and I don’t want to waste their time. It’s a bit of an overstatement, but they do often think “What do I need someone to do RIGHT NOW?”, not two or three months from now. So I didn’t want to talk to them, have them go, “Perfect, start doing this”, and then have to say, “Wait a minute, I’m not free until two months from now.” To which some could conceivably say, “Two months? That’s a lifetime from now!”.
I confess, somewhat both arrogantly and humbly, that I have “options”. Lots of people have said, “Sooooo”, and want to have a chat. So I know I’ll find “something”, but will it be the right thing? If I’m going to do a proper search, and I should this time (although grasping something willy nilly last time worked out well for me!), then I need the time to do the real search, chatting people up, asking their advice.
So I officially started looking today. Reaching out, scheduling meetings. I had been waiting until after May, but someone I respect advised me that it wasn’t too early, particularly if I made it clear right up front that I was looking for something in late Spring, not now. It would slow the conversation pace, slow the urgency of meeting, and people have been saying yes to the meetings. I’ve set up three so far, and two others are pending scheduling. Very diverse groups, very different job possibilities. I have another four or five in mind, and the conversations with the first batch may generate more, or different ones, for the second round. Or they may lead to something that negates the second round. I had two already in the last six months, and one was great but not with the current management structure and one was good, but a bad fit for me on the real work. I could do it, but my heart wouldn’t be in it, even if I love the boss.
I have a good idea of what I’m looking for, partly as I know myself and my interests+skills pretty well, but also because I did a fairly methodical review of my past jobs and what I liked about them. That’ll be in the next post…
Is anybody else looking for a change in their job this year?
