[Yesterday’s run: 3.4 miles]
Yesterday was Labor Day, an official holiday and the traditional bookend of summer along with Memorial Day in May.
It is hard to see a Monday holiday go by without some work to be done for the office. I will be marking down 2.5 hours of Exempt CTO on my time card in this pay period. I used to just consider such things well offset by my goofing around during the normal course of business. But now I have two (count ’em 2) bosses looking over my shoulder and my days of being footloose and fancy free are gone. They have published how-to-do-your-time-card policies and I’m supposed to get prior approval of time wasting and out-of-hours working in excess of 2 hours.
Our little bit of system maintenance seems to have gone smoothly, we will find out for sure once the user community is back in full swing this morning.
Another push from the boss(es) is to get a regular maintenance window established. That’s probably a good idea. But it means that the consumption of some portion of my weekends and holidays will be officially codified.
Things change. I used to be near the top org-chart wise reporting to the top engineer. Not that I’m really part of engineering, I was just a loose end and that was a handy place to put me. But a few years ago they put me in with the IT department, basically to put computer guys all in the same basket. Then a year ago they hired a new IT manager and he has been more involved with my project than any other manager in the past. And in the last few weeks they hired yet another manger, a sub-manager to the IT boss, who handles my thing and the server/network folks of the IT department.
I addition, there are now two of me. Another guy was hired and given my same title. He is still learning, coming up to speed. We get along really well and I enjoy working with him. But it means I have this whole new constellation of people to satisfy.
We will see how things evolve from here.
I tend to be a glass-half-empty kind of guy, so it’s important to point out that I get to work from my home office a thousand miles away, I set my own task list on most days, and the people I work with are generally nice folks.
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p.s. I heard from the auto repair shop up in Olive Branch that they were able today (Tuesday) to collect the “new” old truck from the City of Olive Branch. The man said they would be looking at it tomorrow.