Well, it’s almost midnight, and we’re still trying to leave on our trip up north to Olympia for Christmas. In our household, the house has to be clean, the laundry done and put away, the fridge cleared of spoilables, and the beds made before we can walk out the door. Being the driver, that’s no fun: I just want to put some music on and step on the gas for eighteen hours. The sooner we leave, the sooner I get to sleep after it’s all over. But H can’t enjoy herself unless she knows she’s coming back to a situation that’s not in the red, and I understand that. I’m fortunate enough to have a coworker who does a great job covering for me when I’m out of the office; if I leave something undone, chances are it will be taken care of before I return. There are no such gnomes in our domestic life.

This trip is coming on the heels of a grueling ten-day. Remember my little story a few months ago about the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) auditors and “the little negro boy” that “danced to the sound”? Well I didn’t see that backside of that audit until last Thursday. They were having me take screenshots of blank configuration screens to show that there was nothing to show, asking me all sorts of maddening questions that didn’t demonstrate an understanding of the technical environment that I was operating in. One fun was was being grilled on our software testing and deployment practices and getting our heads bitten off because our developers are also the guys who deploy to production. We used to have nine people in our development group, two of which were dedicated to quality assurance (defect testing or QA) and deployment. All developers were laid off except three (roughly one to cover each tier of “three-tier architecture) and now it’s fairly obvious why we are forced to deploy our own code and do our own QA. At the time of the layoffs, those of us remaining were given letters stating that we’d were likely to be laid off upon completion of our project, a projected six months away. That was three years ago. The project is still incomplete. Ok, enough asides.

The day after the auditors leave, a couple of network engineers from corporate show up to replace our firewall with a pair from another vendor. I’ve been slowly pushed out of having much responsibility for any technical area that I’m particularly skilled in, and now I don’t handle routing or network security. That’s ok I guess, but I was really steamed when I told them that I needed the new firewall to dump syslogs to my monitoring station so that I could watch what was happening if I needed to, and they shot me down. “Just call us if you have questions.” But I don’t usually decide whether I have questions until I’ve checked the logs…. So there was that. I could make a fairly impressive list of the things that I know how to do well and have done for years that I’ve lost the sanction to do during the last six months. Now when I tell a coworker “I’ll take care of it,” that often means that I’ll call a few people and see if I can find someone to take care of it. Waiting time of 5-20 minutes gets transformed to between 45 minutes and a week.

All this to say, my job satisfaction level isn’t particularly high right now. My only good technical outlet is the consulting work I’ve been able to do for a few local businesses.