Ye ole Cafe

[Back2Good]

Back2Good, what a great post!  Babychicks! How adorable.  

Willie33, so clever to then post Snoopy's baby chick friends.

Ice, you had me thinking for just a second that it was actually Friday.  ;-)

Linville, any idea why you had that good stretch of sleep?  

Audrey, work is almost always stressful it seems.  Of course I don't know if that is true for you but IME work is either stressful, or boring.  Seems so hard to hit that middle ground of interesting and fulfilling.  I wish you the best of luck.  Also, no mgt loyalty to the employees any more at all.  Sorry if I missed the ball a bit on your works pains, trying to empathize a bit.  I worked full time for 18 years so I kind of remember.  Plus DH is still part of the daily grind.  His company keeps cutting back on staff and he just keeps absorbing more and more work.

Man I want to work with Back2Good!  I will be in charge of playing with the baby chicks.  ;-)

Off to make some breakfast and lunches.  Hope everyone has a good day!

LOL, I sincerely doubt you'd want to work with me FirePlaces...In fact, I grew so tired of the job I've held for the past 8 years (managing projects to complete the hardware, storage, networking, firewall setup, load balancing, and architecture of new customer environments in our data center) and the horrid hours I have to put in (5:30AM - 5:30PM, five days a week, and on-call every other weekend - The only thing that kept me there for 8 years was the fact that I can work from home and the overtime money - 20 hours of OT at time and a half per week is darn good money) that I applied for, interviewed for 6 weeks for, and finally got (just last Friday) an internal transfer.  A transfer to a project management position in a part of the firm completely unrelated to IT altogether - the HR Mergers and Acquisitions shop.

I'll have a lot to learn about what they do and how they do it before I can start to establish project management office standards, policies, and procedures, build out a work breakdown structure that organizes all of the tasks necessary to complete a merger or acquisition and lists estimated durations for those tasks, and it's only at that point that I'll be able to start creating project plans for each deal and managing the work to the plan.  I'm truly blessed that I've been able to work from home for the past 8 years, with infrequent (once or twice per year) trips to the data center when large new deliveries of hardware come in that have to be racked, stacked, and powered, and I remain blessed in that my new position is also a work from home position (the team is scattered across the globe - Lots of conference calls and a few Webexes per week, for which I keep a dress shirt hanging on a bookshelf in my home office, and quickly put it on over the T-shirt I wear for most of the day, then take off and hang back on the bookshelf when the Webex ends).  The hours will probably suck just as badly or worse than those I'm working now, since this position reports to the Corporate headquarters, and not one of the many divisions of the company, so the projects will span the globe (we acquire 4-10 firms per year, all over the world), and I'll probably have to adapt to a super-shift work schedule...work with deal leads on project tasks a few hours in the early morning (3AM - 6AM), rest for a bit, work a few hours at midday (11AM - 2PM), rest for a bit, then work for a few hours in the evening (6PM - 9PM), and fit my reporting in during my "rest" periods - But hey, same deal as my old job, overtime at time and a half, and NO weekend work this time.

It isn't a promotion (there's no pay raise involved, and my job title will remain the same), just a lateral transfer away from work I now find uninteresting and rote, and a away from a new manager who is 20 years my junior, has never worked in the software as a service, software on-demand, or cloud applications field, yet insists that he can improve efficiency in the organization, and is running around trying to prove it by micromanaging tasks he knows nothing about, and trying to be a hard ass about the 7 (seven!) new weekly reports he's requiring.  I can stomach a lot, but I'm simply too old, and yes, grouchy, to suffer fools gladly...And the new manager our VP brought in is nothing if not a fool.  My new boss is an Executive VP 9 years my senior, who has been in his job for almost 17 years, and after the several interviews I've had with him, I'm satisfied that he not only knows what he's doing, but that he's not the micromanaging type.  That's good enough for me.

Yes, I'd suggest not working with me - I'm so drained by Fridays that I need the entire weekend to recover (all of this would be much easier if I were 25 years younger, but at my age, it's exhausting), but with the crazy hours I work, weekends are the only time I have to spend with my wife other than an hour, perhaps an hour and a half watching TV at night - And she likes to get out and about, or work on lawn maintenance or improvements to the chicken facilities, so it's not so much rest I'm getting as it is a break from the insane hours and a chance to get outdoors and get some exercise in besides my hideously boring daily treadmill sessions.

But the baby chicks?  You would be welcome to play with and cuddle them all you like.  We make it a point to hold them, talk to them, give them names, and hand feed and water them from the time they hatch, so all of our adult chickens are the gentlest creatures on earth, and come to their chicken house from their range when called for bedtime, just like a dog or cat might.  The more cuddling they get the better, as far as I'm concerned!