Luzern, Schweiz

I am in Switzerland again for work, on some sort of top secret Special Ops Engineering mission with another Sr. FAE. On his advice, I flew in the Friday before our three day stretch in-office, and have the weekend to myself. Friday was consumed by the rigors of arriving, napping, adjusting and finding something to eat for dinner. I'm staying at the Walhalla, which is close to the Zürich Hauptbahnhof, instead of at the Seefeld which is further down the lake. We traveled to the Seefeld to see another co-worker, who departed early Saturday morning for home.

On Saturday, I took the Zug (train) down to Luzern to go exploring. It's the first adventure I have had here, outside of walking the Altstadt in Zürich. It was supposed to be rainy and cold, but the weather held out for the day. I met a nice couple from Omaha on the train, and we decided to adventure together through Luzern. They wanted to go to the top of Pilatus, and it sounded like fun to me, so I was the translator and our trio headed by bus, cable car, and sky gondola up the mountain to the -6 deg C weather at the very top.

After the mountain, we made our way back to the city center, explore the Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge) and walked to the Löwendenkmal. I took the 16.50 train back to Zürich, sharing a quick conversation with M via SMS before his morning class began, and set about getting the photos online when I got back to my room.

I've spoken more German in the last two days than I think I have in the previous five years. Most of it is asking for directions, or ordering food, or buying tickets. Now and then there's a bit of polite chit-chat, or an unexpected aside from someone who does not know I primarily speak English. I'm getting by, which surprises me (pleasantly) since it's been 12+ years since I had any sort of fluency.

Today is rainy and cold, and three days of interrupted and shallow sleep have caught up with me. I had designs on visiting Basel or Rapperswil, but I think I'm going to take it easy and hang around here. Catch up on some sleep. Maybe wander around the old city if the rain lets up. The purpose of my trip is to be useful Monday-Wednesday at work, so I should make sure I'm up for that. Maybe I'll just find somewhere to sit, sip Milchkaffee and watch the weather and the Limmat flow past.

Luzern photos, on Flickr.

Spring

I had great plans to write all about Thanksgiving, and our recipes, and our family fun, but then time passed too quickly and all my plans got away from me. Thanksgiving was wonderful. There was a requisite turkey-related mishap, but it was very small and didn't impinge on the holiday. We had an abundance of cheesecake and just enough leftovers. We liked the turkey thing enough that we made another for Christmas, and then learned that a turkey for just the two of us is way, way too much bird.

We're still using up the frozen turkey stock, eight cups to go.

Christmas was lovely. Instead of a mountain of presents from my grandparents, we got exactly what I'd hoped for: hand stitched ornaments for our tree. Little things to treasure, and pass down, and celebrate. It's worth more to me than a bunch of stuff.

We have an abundance of stuff.

My mom spent a lot of this winter telling me about the mountain of stuff at her mother in law's, which my mother and her husband are sorting through and fighting with E's sister about. It sounds terrible. Stacks of old, unopened toothpaste. A lifetime supply of Tums. I don't remember the specifics, and the truth is that they don't even matter -- there's just too much stuff. Too. Much. Stuff.

In some sort of reflexive reaction to these stories, M and I made a stab at organizing the garage room this weekend. It is going to take many, many weekends for us to really get a handle on that space, but we're started now and that's very important. The bad part is that we're trying to get the space organized so we can put more stuff in that room and less in the rest of the house (which ultimately leads to more stuff everywhere, I'm pretty sure).

This is the closest to Spring Cleaning I get, people.

Outside of the Stuff Wars, we're doing okay. We sort of mid-review on a lot of different levels. We're two-thirds done with our taxes, reviewing our investments and savings plan, waiting to see what my raise is going to be and how last year's bonus will pay out -- February seems to be when I clean house financially, if not literally. M's rounded the half-way mark on school, and that's sitting better with everyone. We've earmarked a few house projects for this year, and bought our plane tickets for this summer's vacation.

I've also had a few unsubtle reminders to keep in perspective how much seemingly little things can affect other people for the positive. Sometimes we downplay the effect we have on other people's lives, or miss acknowledging it entirely. It seems to be an object lesson at the moment, one the Universe has on repeat.

On outside matters, our tiny garden has started looking like Spring. There are lettuces peeking up and the Apricot's in bloom. M bought a lawnmower with some of the Christmas money, and keeps hacking at the palm trees in his spare time.

I wax in and out of love with my job. Right now I am very much in a holding pattern, waiting to transition into the next stage of my life once M graduates and our opportunities free up again. I don't know if this job will be part of that next great adventure, but it's still integral to our Now. Part of this great journey is finding reasons to love it until we don't need it any more, and that's easier some days than others.

Special Ops Engineering: Bienvenue au Québec

Customs was painless this time. Friendly even. I got teased for knowing no more French than merci beaucoup, which Grandma Stone taught me, along with s'il vous plaît, so I can at least be politely ignorant.

Unlike Greece, stop signs are in the native language. It's hard adjusting to the autoroute signage and I admittedly don't know what towns are north/south or east/west of anything out here yet. It doesn't help that it was 1am, and I was driving with my directions held up to catch the illumination of the car behind me.

M and I make a much better driving-in-a-foreign-language team than I do solo, but I'm getting by. Tomorrow I drive from Montreal to Quebec City. Thursday I drive back, and fly home.

Bonus? I now know "Exit" in four languages: Exit. Ausgang. Sortie. έξοδος. (Maybe five, if it's Salida in Spanish.)

Special Ops Engineering: 730a meetings

Overheard on a con call near you:
Boss: And we'll be moving headcount from the Bay to Thousand Oaks/LA.
All: *crickets*
Boss: I assume that will make some people happy to hear.
K: We are politely refraining from having a party on the conference call.
All: *laughter*
Boss: That's more like it.

Now, please excuse me while I victory dance around the office.

January, January

Month of resolutions. I try not to make resolutions as much as I make plans. Plans are fluid and accept that life and priorities change with experience and additional information. Examples of this year's goals*:

1. Return to a lifestyle of financial awareness and active saving. Having reviewed our budget, I propose we attempt to save an additional $200/month over what is going directly to the 401K and whatever our investments are earning. Bonuses will continue to go directly to savings, unless otherwise earmarked. From savings, we can talk to the financial planner about broader and more expansive goals. (Yes. M & I have a financial planner. It's called "recognizing your boundaries" and not wanting to shove everything under my mattress.)

2. Trend toward smaller portions and healthier foods. M and I enjoy cooking and eating, but there's no reason we can't go back to having a reasonable amount of leftovers to tide him over through the week while I'm away.

3. Travel. This summer's goal is Scotland & Ireland. I want to go see Scott soon. M needs to get some stamps in his passport, and my new one is going to feel so empty.

4. Make peace with my job. 2010 was extremely frustrating, with the re-org and a new management structure to get used to, and a shifted region, and new responsibilities. My 2009 review was somewhat bitter, as I felt that my shortfalls reflected and resulted from my team structure as much as myself. I've had a year to fix those performance points, and hopefully my 2010 review will look a lot better. Still hoping for Sr. Engineer -- still expecting it not to go through. If I'm going to stick this out until M graduates, I need to find a way to focus on the parts of my job that I love. (Easier said than done when one is staring down two consecutive working weekends.)

5. Continue to make measurable progress on the house. (Oh, sub-lists, you are endless here.)

6. In the same vein of creative a sustainable financial plan, and reining in our unhealthier food choices, we've agreed to look into a cleaning person for a couple times a month. I can keep up with laundry, and M does dishes, but we can't really do the deep cleaning necessary to keep a house clean while I'm working this crazy job. There's also a serious amount of apathy towards housework in both of us.

7. Visit The Outside (tm) more. The quest to get out of the office more renews!

---

* Disclaimer: By no means an exhaustive list.

Special Ops Engineering: Aloha edition

I've been a bad Special Ops Engineer. There were two trips, in May, back to the Nat'l HQ that I didn't bother documenting. It was travel hell, but beautifully lush and verdant while I was there. Delta credited me about a bazillion bonus miles for the inconvenience of sleeping in Atlanta, twice, and being delayed into Saturday for my return flight on another leg. *handwave* Let's pretend that didn't happen. Moving on to June.

Last week my boss called, sounding very serious. "K," he said. "I need you to fly to Hawaii. There's an emergency." You think I'm joking. I can see it, through the internet. No one's job has emergencies that require a tropical destination. Never in three-and-a-half years has dispatch sent me to Hawaii. But it's true, and off I went!

The problem with working in Hawaii is that over-nighting parts isn't an option. Combine FedEx's "that's not in the continental US" take on the Islands with Island Time, and you've got a recipe for disaster. Instead, the parts get over-nighted to me, I cram them into a "spare suitcase" (you have one of those, right?), and they become a second checked bag when I fly over the Pacific. The problem with this plan is that if I find I need another part while I'm there... well, over-nighting still isn't an option. So you order everything you might need, and end up carrying stuff back home with you too.

Waikiki, while gorgeous, is not really designed for people who have to work. Flying in at after-midnight o'clock gave me a unique perspective on the street signs there: They're non-existant. I drove around like an idiot for thirty minutes longer than necessary, finally got to my room around one, and had to be back out the door before seven. HQ helped with that early wake-up, too, since they're six hours ahead of Hawaii. My phone rang at four AM local time.

The lab I was going to is hidden in the hills, squirreled away like some remote ninja temple. Leaving the freeway, one must traverse a windy residential street until it narrows into a war-torn path, complete with imposing gate and guard who does not know if the Dept. of Health is actually up this road, because he's never been inside "The Area." Near the summit, past several dilapidated and unused municipal buildings, there is a small white sign with faded black letters and an ambiguous arrow. Follow it, turn right into the parking lot, and Lo! and Behold! There is a huge lab building up there, hiding, where no one would ever think to find it.

You think I'm joking again, don't you? Ask M. He's been there too!

The repair itself went well. Everything was sorted by late afternoon. Thursday night I slept like a rock, and I spent Friday adventuring! I drove east out of Waikiki, around Diamond Head, past a broad bay (where I found a new pet: Hermit Crab; Can I keep it?), past the snorkeling bay of infamy, past a blowhole; onward and somewhat inland. I picked up lunch to go and took it to the botanical gardens, which are free, and had a picnic at the visitor's center before wandering down toward the lake. Then I drove around the north shore, had a banana-coconut-chocolate milkshake and dipped by toes in the ocean before heading back to the airport just as the rain began to fall.

There pictures! So it really happened.

I spent a lot of my drive thinking about my brother. How, as a young teen, he spent an entire Hawaiian vacation trying to come up with the perfect description of the blue water he saw off-shore. How that precious brat (I say with all the love and tolerance of a know-it-all big sister) threw around "cerulean" and "azure" as if they were nothing-words, commonplace in a Jr. High vocabulary. He's a published author now, I thought, as I drove. I also thought of my husband, who had not enjoyed his solo adventuring on the same Island but who had brought home fond memories of our honeymoon. I thought of many family vacations, good memories all of them, and how I had favorite places on an Island that had never been home.

I enjoy traveling. I enjoy it enough to say I love traveling, but what I love most of all is when a once far-flung place becomes familiar enough to have favorites, habits, memories ingrained in its very soil, places I would share with friends or family if they traveled with me in the future. I love finding Home in all the places I visit, and then bringing that bit of Home back with me to share.

I took the red-eye home Friday night, and now it's back to work as usual.

Special Ops Engineering: auf der Schweiz

This week, I am in Switzerland for work. I arrived very early Monday, and found my way to my hotel -- via two trains, and a half-km walk. That afternoon, a colleague and I went on a 5km walk about, up along the river and through the old city, and then ducked into a pub for dinner. The next day was all sightseeing (and walking), and then a short nap, followed by more sight-seeing! Today we actually had to go to work.

I take the S7 train two stops from Stadelhofen to Uetikon, and then it's a 10min walk to the building. Everyone is really friendly, and the city is super clean and efficient. Our course is pretty interesting, too, which is the real reason that work sent me out here. I'm becoming an "expert" at something... which seems to be mostly about looking at edge cases, and trying to figure out how to troubleshoot more efficiently and get ahead of what's coming down the pike before our Sales people sell it.

And I wasn't the first person in class to be told This is impossible. So... win?

More stories later. I have to walk back to the Old City to meet everyone for dinner. (Add 9hrs to the time stamp of this post for Zürich local time).

Re-org

I think we just got reorganized out of any warm fuzzy feelings I had left for my job. Not only did I not join the ranks of Sr. Engineers, I also did not end up a team leader, and I did not get to keep some of my more favorite rookies ... my new team is the two San Diego people, and two Texas people. They are not re-hiring for LA, which means I cover it by driving. I am no longer covering the Bay Area, where I have friends and family and favorite places to be after work.

Now I'm working the weekend for a trade show, and I'm pretty damn pissed about the whole thing. So let's not talk about work for awhile, please. And hopefully I'll find my head by Monday and not say things like "I quit" to people who can say "Okay!" instead of "You're kidding, right?"

Bad. Day.

I have been working stupid hours lately. I am really anxious about my job. I am working with one of the Sr. Engineers today, and made a crack to one of our coworkers that D's talking me out of quitting... only my coworker didn't laugh. He said, "There's a lot of that going around these days."

The 405 N tried to kill me today. It dropped a huge drop cloth-sized sheet of plastic wrap on my windscreen. In the number two lane of 405 just before the 10. I could see out the top 6" of my window. This was in the new car, which doesn't yet have plates, and people honked and flipped me off as I tried to maneuver (with my emergency flashers) to the right hand shoulder so I could peel the plastic wrap off my car and keep driving. (I am fine, the car is fine, everyone's fine -- no harm done, except the spike in my heart rate and stress level.)

Understandably... I was a little late to work. And the customer was a bitch about it.

As of Monday, I will be working 12 days straight. Yay trade shows.

M and I had a fight this morning.

I have had a migraine all week.

Seriously, 2010, we are not off to an awesome start. How about we both take a deep breath and try this again. Tomorrow, I will work a reasonable number of hours. I will solve some problems, and people will be happy about it. I will not poke the robot with sticks (however appropriate it seems at the time) and I will not tell anyone that I want to quit my job (however appropriate it seems at the time).

In return, the 405 will NOT try to kill me on my return trip to San D. I think this is a fair request.

Also... esoteric driver errors are SO Dec 2009. Please cease and desist and move on to a new pain-in-the-ass error for me to troubleshoot.

Special Ops Engineering: Energizer Bunny in the Windy City

M and I surrendered all hope of a weekend together and boarded the 1:35 flight to Chicago on Friday afternoon. We gathered our check luggage and trekked across O'Hare to the on-site Hilton. There we met up with most of the other Special Ops Engineers, management, and some of the people involved in our new software suite.

After many hours of meetings, far too much alcohol, and an intriguing game involving bumper cars, hi li, and a 3-hooped goal... we gathered up to remember 2008 and celebrate a few of our colleagues. I received the Energizer Bunny Award, which is a plastic bunny figurine glued to a wooden base with a nice brass nameplate. Apparently there was stiff competition for this in 2008, so I should feel honored to have a violently-pink bunny on my bookshelf.

We got back late yesterday, and M's already in the Bay Area again. I leave for Tucson/Phoenix tomorrow (but not until I've driven to Capistrano and back at least once). We'll see each other again as something other than coworkers on Friday night. Twelve straight days of work, a new software suite, installs and down robots. Whee.

I think I'm gonna beg out of Comic-Con so I can be antisocial for a little bit.

Special Ops Engineering: Short-handed

It's Monday again, and we're fresh off our two-hour conference call with Sales & Service. Sales is pushing very hard for us all to defy the odds and complete all of their orders by noon tomorrow, and Service is pushing very hard for no one to get sent to Canada (or Van Nuys, in my case) for the Thursday before a holiday weekend. We have very different agendas at the end of Q2. Sales wants their numbers to come in high, and Service wants to survive to see the dawn of Q3.

I am exhausted and not at all ready to conquer the final days of June with poise and grace. But I should -- dangerous word, that -- finish my revenue recognition requirements in time to make our numbers look good. I've finished Frankenrobot -- the upgrade that required an upgrade and special permission from the Mother Ship, guided only by a photograph and some cryptic configuration files (from an incompatible software version, of course) -- and I'm on to It Should Be Simple. Nothing I do is simple anymore...

On this morning's call, I got to hear about the next big hateful thing to theoretically arrive on my professional to-do list. For you IT professionals out there, it amounts to a dying computer with an irretrievable absolutely critical software platform on the HDD that cannot be recreated elsewhere, that obviously hasn't been backed up (ever). Nevermind that an install backup would be utterly useless, as the platform has diverged from its installed form over nearly five years of use. Add to this a production environment and an end-user with a faulty grasp of the English language, a little robotics, and a four hour drive each way. Hurrah! Also the guy who wrote the software package lives 1/3 of the way around the world, but that hardly seems like an inconvenience to me... until he refuses to get on a plane, which he ultimately will.

And for the crowning jewel of our Monday call... our team has seven positions. Two of those people are at training, one is out on sick leave all week, and one is leaving soon for shinier toys, more blinking LEDs, and a more reasonable cost of living... Whee. That means we have three people with their head fully in the end-of-half game. Go Team!

Don't worry... I won't be snapping and building Skynet any time soon. But I am really looking forward to a long weekend. Rather than making a laundry list of things to-do with our three days off, I think I'm going to spend some time looking up tasty marinades so we can grill an assortment of summery foods and relax on our mostly-organized patio, and enjoy so well-earned time off. M's traveling all week, so his long weekend will start very late Thursday evening and we're both back up and at 'em on Monday, trying to catch up with the critical failures that always happen over a holiday weekend.

Special Ops Engineering: 14 out of 15

By Friday, I will have spent fourteen of the last fifteen working days on the road, with no office days. Forgive me if I'm feeling a bit grouchy and/or homesick. M spends a lot of his time traveling too. We have two new rookies but that won't help us cover anything for at least three months (more realistically six), and another veteran Special Ops Engineer is transitioning to a new deployment in July.

Shoot me now please.

What does this transition mean for me? I have no idea, since my boss doesn't seem to like talking about manpower shortages or coverage. He's more of a do-what-you-have-to-do-and-stop-complaining sort of guy. I'm more of a tell-me-in-advance-and-no-one-gets-hurt kind of girl. We have issues, and that complicates an already crazy and tumultuous work style... which is about to get loads more fun.

The long and short of this situation is that I'm going to get an "opportunity" to take on more responsibility, whether I like it or not, which may or may not result in a new title and/or a pay increase. Most likely not. My manager also does not like to recognize excellence or promote anyone. I'm also likely to continue my trend of living in hotels and flying on multiple airplanes every frickin' week.

I'm now feeling the irony in the pep talk I gave a coworker a couple weeks ago. Taking this crazy position has freed me from a lot of preconceptions I held about myself and my need for stability, or being a homebody, or feeling incontrovertibly introverted. I've definitely grown as a person and a professional. The challenge has been good for me. But there's a point where challenge for challenge's sake alone becomes annoying rather than transformative. Yeah I can do this (and well at that), but do I really want to?

For now, the answer's yes. For a purely economic reason: I can make enough in this job at my seniority level to support us while M's in school, and until I can replace that in another (more appealing?) position or until M graduates, I'm staying.

Money is not the ends to everything, though. Sometimes I'd like to sleep in my own damn bed ... with M.

Special Ops Engineering: Canada Edition

Help me! I am trapped in a city whose major claim to fame is having the world's largest mall! ... No, I did not go shopping. What are you thinking?

On the other hand, I got to see a big freaking river. We don't have big freaking rivers at home, so that's definitely a plus.

It's flat here, and still brown from winter. There will not be pictures. Yesterday was warm and sunny, today is windy as hell and cold. Dusk extends well past 9p, and everyone's been fairly friendly. I've noticed a disturbing misunderstanding that San Diego = LA = Orange County = Almost TJ.

It feels very rural here. There's apartment complexes nestled up tightly against one another... and then vast tracts of nothingness extending away from the city center. I got very lost trying to navigate, but eventually found my way to/from my account.

Thank goodness for the internet. I can keep in touch with M even when I can't talk to him, all thanks to the hotel's wifi. ^^

... *headdesk*

I have something like $40,000 worth of parts out for delivery -- enough to almost completely rebuild an instrument from the chassis up -- and someone sent them out for 4:30p delivery, on a Friday, to the wrong customer. It's something obscene like 6 hours of work, plus testing, and I won't be able to really get started until 5:30 pm.

I know it's an honest mistake, but I'm really quite peeved.

I'm feelin' this...

It's been a long time since my iPod and I had any quality time together. My year-long project was too short a commute to warrant booting up anything auxiliary to my in-dash stereo. (I listened to a lot of NPR.) Flights to and from the Bay Area are hardly long enough to bother with untangling the wires for my earbuds. I'll do the crossword in the in-flight magazine, maybe a sudoku, or take a nap. But today, today I spent 3 hours in my car, with my iPod, tuning out the world (especially dispatch and my boss).

I forgot how cathartic it can be to turn up the stereo and just follow the tail lights in front of me. Capistrano is a good distance for that. Just long enough to put my driving habits on cruise control, and not long enough for me to run out of playlist before I get where I'm going. I revisited a few albums I really like but don't make M suffer through and now I'm home and exhausted after a left-brained day of troubleshooting.

It can't always be jumping out of airplane time. Sometimes the job is just a grind like anyone else's. Except it isn't like everyone else's, which makes even the grinding days tolerable. Every "bad" day gets compared back to something earlier, and as long as I can keep saying "Well, it's not as bad as _____" then I'll probably keep showing up to work. Inertia's the worst part of it; once I get up out of the office and start in on fixing things, the day goes by fairly quickly.

Special Ops Engineering: Support Group

I've changed my outbound flight twice and my return flight three times in the last four days. That's just the sort of week it's been. The upside of staying up here another night (for a service call with NO PARTS!) is that I got to have dinner in SF with one of my coworkers.

You know, the guy who's working insane hours trying to keep on top of everything and slowly realizing he no longer has a social life... I was that guy in my first year too, less the "guy" part, of course. ;)

Some times you have to just sit down with someone else who walks the walk and check in. Otherwise it gets really lonely. It's hard to explain the sort of stresses our travel schedules create on relationships with friends and family.

We chatted about the soul-eating aspects of man hours reports, travel-heavy weeks/months/years, and how hard it is to set boundaries that let us put the job down and get in some recovery time. Recovery time can be loosely defined as an opportunity to do laundry, or vent about our customers/coworkers/boss, or even just cook a meal in your own kitchen and eat without also typing an email on your phone. It's the little stuff that a lot of other people take for granted amidst their myriad of weeknight activities or events.

It's probably not the best idea to introduce someone with no free time to WoW, but the prospect of being able to connect with people who can relate whilst bashing monster skulls in with a big shiny axe/sword/pole arm/mace is quite therapeutic when you have no idea where you'll be on any given day. It helps M and I keep in touch when we're traveling, and our work buddy may join in, too. It might give him a reason to put down the metric hex keys and context shift away from the suffocating barrage of email. We'll see.

Everyone copes with the job differently. The people who don't find a way to cope with it burn out, break down and move on. We're going to be down two people in our region soon, so I do hope our coworker finds a way to cope with the stress. Otherwise we'll be down three people soon.

As for me, I'm finally getting ready to board my flight home. The one that was originally scheduled for 8:45p Wednesday. Yeah... it's been that kind of week.

Special Ops Engineering: "One-day" business trip, Day 3

I really know better than to fly without my tools or a week's worth of clothes, but I believed my manager when he said "one-day training" and hopped on a plane to San Jo' with the bare essentials.

I suppose he was technically correct. Our training was one day, and now I've spent another day at a customer site playing Look Like You Know What You're Talking About. Choir taught me the awesome skill set of Follow Along And Try Not To Look Lost. Look Like You Know What You're Talking About is really just a specialized implementation of my choir skill set, paired with Read Helpfile While Customer Gets Coffee.

Also, working with my boss makes me privy to information about our region that I don't need and don't necessarily want. It's an interesting balance. I suppose I should get used to it; my review indicates that I'm "on the fast track to Sr. Engineer." Sr. Engineers focus on problematic accounts, development of the region, mentoring, more complicated systems, etc. It's like leadership and crisis management bundled up on top of our usual jumping out of helicopters role.

If I ever make Senior, Matt's going to have fun re-imagining my job.

Right now, I'm pretty happy that I'm managing the transition back to field work fairly well, on a technical level. I was rather concerned that my inexperience with our general install pool would bite me in the ass, after spending so long on a highly specialized instrument. So far, so good. Take that with the caveat, though, that I'm mostly working with other people at the moment, and not entirely on my own.

Supervision

I'm back in the field, more or less, closing out open calls with our new Special Ops Engineer. This means I'm backup troubleshooting help, on point for phone calls to other "agents", and the local authority on what (not) to put on your paperwork.

It also means that I sit around watching someone else work. I don't need to practice changing consumables, or taking off dress panels. And while I can probably do it faster (and in my sleep), that's not the point. I'm there to supervise, and step in when things get ugly.

I'm grateful for the step-wise reintroduction to my old job. I think it's good for my confidence and better for the new engineer's. Hopefully we'll knock out the rest of the open issues, I'll pack up my monster, and I'll finally be released from weekly conference calls, large international emails, and allowed to negotiate my own schedule once more.

I've got to say... I don't mind my real job, so far. It's very different to be working on an issue that you firmly believe can and will be resolved. Perhaps not easily, nor in a timely manner, but knowing there's an answer out there makes a huge difference to me.

Can I get a raise in my allowance?

You may remember that they're changing part of my Special Ops Engineering reimbursement package. Something about cars, miles driven, government compliance standards, and getting paid less.

I love the getting paid less part.

I voiced my undying love of the getting paid less part at the regional meeting, and was told that the intent was not to pay us less. In fact, some people should be making more.

According to their math, I should be making more.

(PS: They're crazy.)

So December comes around, we report our mileage like good monkeys, and our January disbursement is calculated. Somebody somewhere is making more money, according to the higher-ups. Nobody at my house is making more money.

In fact, what was once ~$540 per paycheck (bi-weekly) is now ~$490 per month. Wave your hands, do the tax-withholding dance, and it sorts out to... less per month. Which multiplies by twelve for a total of less per year.

Armed with rudimentary math, and a firm understanding of my tax bracket not falling anywhere near the 50+% range, I wrote our HR manager a nice email. Complete with math. And supporting documents.

I held back on the graphs, though.

HR forwarded my complaint to the top of our US reporting structure (which made me glad I'd attached those supporting documents, and scaled back the I-hate-this-program rhetoric to mild displeasure), who then called me this morning to chat.

And re-affirmed my faith in our senior management. I was told, again, that the point is not to pay us less. And we found out which bad assumption drove my compensation into the ground. Someone thought I'd be driving 16K miles for work this year, like I did my rookie year. Except that I'm dedicated to one site for the forseeable future, and that site is 8 miles from home. 10 if I go the long way around.

Maybe if I drove to TJ on my way to work every morning I could hit that 16K mark.

The plan is to sit tight and suck up the pay cut for the next two months on the understanding that they will reevaluate the program in March. For those of us who currently find our reimbursements lacking, there will be profile changes and possibly line item gross ups. From what I've heard, these will be retro-active as well.

Oddly enough, I learned the phrase gross up last night while listening to NPR. Somebody who's been appointed to something used to work for IMF, and they don't withhold US Taxes, so his paycheck was "grossed up" to cover the employer's half of US Taxes... which he was supposed to pay when he filed as self-employed.

Except he didn't.

I hope our gross up doesn't come with an audit and tax complications, and possible disqualification from future consideration for public office. One of my new life goals is to never have my IRS situation discussed/debated on a national public broadcast medium.

There's many reasons why I'm unhappy with Special Ops Engineering at the moment, but I can't honestly say that our senior management is a collection of blood-sucking vampires, or company men. When our number one calls, talks to me about my individual circumstances, and sets out a path toward mutual resolution, I pretty much have to accept that they're humans doing the best they can.

This rules out channeling [GM]Dave and feeding anyone to a purple dragon.

I was looking forward to that part of this paycut, too.

I guess I'll have to go back to hoping that Godzilla breaks in, stomps my robot to the ground, and makes a feature-length film about it for everyone's amusement (and profit!).

Blood, sweat & tears

The process of stripping down and rebuilding my robot has caused much stress, anxiety, frustration, injury and annoyance in the last week. We've enrolled the newly-trained Special Ops Engineer, R, and M in the physical process. People in five time zones have collaborated on the procedure. And we've had no less than seven conference calls entirely or partly dedicated to this fun and exciting process. Tomorrow, backup arrives from Europe with the rare quest item: properly constructed replacement part.

I've got a myriad of bruises and sore muscles, too. Today the ornery robot even drew blood! And I set my engagement ring aside, so I could fit my chubby little hand in a tight space, and spent five minutes in a panic trying to find it again. (It was in my jacket pocket, because that's lined with soft fabric and has a zipper.) I nearly sat down and cried when I thought I'd misplaced it.

The next few days will tell whether this 11th hour decision will put us on track to close out the open issues on my project. Or if it was a sneaky way of forcing me to get some yoga-like exercise done in my work hours. Hrmmm.