Man with a Plan

There have been some huge happenings at work since June, but since my stinkin’ boss sometimes reads my blog (hi, stinkin’ boss!!), there’s not really much I want to say about it out in the open like this.

End of post.

Except I’m drinking a double jigger of black label Southern Comfort and lime right now, so I’ll tell you a little more.

Starting over, there have been huge happenings at work since June. I guess it’s enough to say that I’ve cycled through paranoia and worry and relief so many times that I’m just numb at this point and don’t really care what happens. Except that’s not really true, because there’s still a fair amount of lingering discontent I’m not really sure what to do about: of the five things that really decided me on taking this job back in June of 2006 (the feel of a small company, a super gnarly building, a nine minute drive from the house,  my own office and an ultra-casual dress code), the first thing has been gone for quite a while, three more will vanish by next month and the last won’t make it to January 1st. I also haven’t had a raise in 16 months, but in my mind that’s a fair trade for having a job at all. For those who don’t love me enough to know, I presently sorta-kinda work in the mortgage industry. I don’t know jack diddly about loan origination even now, but my butter is earned from folks who do, and I’m rounded-up-to-a-hundred-percent sure that I would have been standing in a bread line for my butter by now had things not taken an interesting twist around my second anniversary with the company.

Sometime in the June-July timeframe a huge foreign organization bought us up, and we suddenly went from being a hundred-and-something-man shop to a hundred-thousand-and-something-man superentity. Having worked for another huge multi-national for six years, though, and having already suffered through years of trickle-down bureaucracy, this doesn’t pose any real difficulty for me. I already know how to swim in the corporate waters and speak the corporate language, but I guess I will have to get used to hearing that language with a different accent now. But, like I said, even though I don’t really dig the megacorporate scene, I’m fairly confident that the new business has the get-through-it-ness to make it past the current slump… and that that wouldn’t have been the case had we not been gobbled up.

So… unhappy? Yes, about the creature comforts I’ll be giving up. But worried? Not so much now. Until told otherwise, I’m just going to expect to see those checks come in regularly. Until then I’ll do my best work and continue to annoy my boss with half-baked recommendations of automating even more of our processes. I can’t worry about things that are outside my control, so for now Steve Winwood and I will just roll with it, baby.