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2-26-04 // 8.38 pm "yes, crisitunity!" NP: Ben Folds Five - "Whatever And Ever Amen" Sitting here back at the PC in the study, just finishing up working on updating my resume. No, I'm not looking for a new job or anything. Thankfully. It's just that another part of my company is opening an office downtown St. Louis and they're looking for people from my current office. Should they end up wanting me and should I actually want to go work for them, it would take at least a year, maybe a year and a half for my top secret clearance to go through (my current clearance is secret), so basically that job would be starting as my current one was perhaps starting to wind down. In any case, I don't know if anything will come of this new opportunity or not -- there's a very good chance that we're going to get new contracts and further extensions on our current program, so I may stay there in the long term depending on how things work out. But it's nice to have options in one's professional life, I'd say. Anyway, there were even more goings on at work today. Apparently the test department is losing two full time testers and the test manager is trying to lure engineers over to that side of the program. So this morning I sat down with my front line manager to talk about whether or not I'd be interested, career paths, rotations, that sort of thing. Long story short, I told her that I'd be interested in working on the techincal side of test (automation, mostly) but not as an actual tester. Though I did express a great deal of interest in being rotated to the data quality team. I worked briefly for them last year and it was great, like being a data detective. You get error reports & analyze data and work backwards to find out the source of the problemes in the code and/or processes. It's fascinating and enjoyable to me, so I hope a rotation in that direction comes up soon. But yeah...whew. Enough about work and all that. This week I have felt very much out of it, very much not like myself. Still not sure if I'm fending off illness or what the deal is, but for what it's worth I'm finally starting to feel normalized again. It's about damn time. I sometimes detour through East St. Louis and cross the river on the Eads as opposed to staying on the interstate and crossing on the Poplar Street Bridge. I drive around the town fairly often, I'm not scared of it like a lot of people seem to be. Anyway, the other day I was on Collinsville Road, the traditional main shopping street, at dusk. Between the low light, the completel lack of pedestrians or other motor traffic, the bars on the windows, the crumbling four and five story buildings on either side, the old theater with the bushes growing out of the front of the fa�ade...it was like traversing through the ruins of an ancient civilization. While some of the shop fronts were modern, many looked forty years old with signage in long-ago popular fonts and slogans. Anyway, the district is still fairly active and alive on a Saturday afternoon, but driving through at 6 o'clock in the evening on a cloudy evening...it was specatacularly desolate. The image has been running through my mind all week, for some reason. In a few hours Erin will be home from work, I can't wait. I'm not much of a fan of these long days where she's still sleeping as I leave for work and I don't see her again till late in the evening. But it's alright, in a few hours I'll be able to wrap my arms around her, and that's what really matters.
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