So I took today (and tomorrow actually) off. Today I had a trip down to NYC (more on that in a week or so, nothing earth-shattering or life-altering, just met some interesting people in the music industry), and tomorrow I'm going to go see The Matrix.
But on the train ride down and back from the city, I was able to just relax and contemplate this whole situation with WindowsCIO. I know I can be abrasive and annoying (anyone who knows me will confirm that), and I suspect he probably wasn't adequately prepared for my demeanour. I mean, it's entirely possible he might take things personally that are not intended as such (e.g., maybe he thinks "I don't trust him with system access to those systems" or something, when it's really "I don't trust anyone with system access, but I grudgingly give it to people who need it to do their job."
I'm scheduled for a commute day on Tuesday, so I think I'll schedule a sit-down (god this feels like a Sopranos episode) with myself, WindowsCIO, and CluefulExBoss, and we can get things out in the open. He can tell me what I'm doing that he doesn't like (and, heck, I'm sure there's some things like that), and I can hopefully explain why I do those things the way I do, and vice versa.
Because, for as much as I might call where I work "The Pit Of Despair", every company is its own pit of despair in some way*. There are no perfect jobs (well, there were, but then the dotcom bubble demanded that they make money as well, so that whole getting paid to do nothing thing went out the window) and as far as the current workplace goes, it's not as bad as others could be ... I get to telecommute, have a flexible schedule because of that, they recognize the value of the conferences I attend and the knowledge I bring back so they pay for one or two a year, and (I'm sure, after WindowsCIO gets his feet wet, and understands what I do), I'll be able to just go back to working on my own and concentrate on "getting shit done."
*The original "Pit Of Despair" was actually a company called CSI in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and it wasn't even me who worked there. It was a co-worker who had quit there to found the company I was working for, but got dragged back in as a high-paid consultant, where he constantly debated between "great pay" and "crappy defense contractor work". One night after playing far too much Diablo online, he said he had to go back to work, at which point, in my best Monty Python accent, I said he was being "...cast into the Pit Of Despair" .. and it stuck. Later, that just became generic for "the workplace", as we expanded the alt.sysadmin.recovery adage of "All Hardware sucks, and all software sucks", to "all workplaces suck", and it's been there ever since. ... There's a piece of Derek history you never thought you'd hear. ;-)
