After a good night's sleep my manager returned to normal yesterday and had a reasonable discussion with me and others over the events of Tuesday. The end result is that I've been given the task of "cat herding" another team that has been seriously derelict in their duties. In exchange my own duties have been given second priority. Basically, I've been given some power to go along with the responsibility.
For the next month I'm going to be pushing the body hard so to speak, so posting will be erratic. I'll try to make up for it with more evening blogging.
As a side note I reference my "dark days in Toronto" in my last post. I figured this would be a good time to elaborate.
I graduated from Carleton University in the summer of 1998 with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree and 20 months of co-op experience. Unfortunately, around this time the programming language Java was hot and I had no experience with it. In fact, almost all my experience was with a language called Smalltalk that had basically died over the previous year or two while I was finishing up school. I was never an earlier adopter (I'm still not) so I graduated and found myself pretty much obsolete.
I looked for work but found nothing in Ottawa. I expanded my search criteria and found a position that wanted a Smalltalk developer in the north end of Toronto. I took it and my wife and I moved to Barrie where I could commute to Toronto everyday for two and a half years. The first year was easy, but I developed new skills and took on more responsibility and by the second year I was a senior developer in a very small programming shop. I had a lot of tasks per day and a lot of people depending on me at any one moment. Around the end of the second year it literally got to the point where I was ready to have a breakdown because, to put it simply, there was too much to do and it was all "High" priority. They finally started hiring more staff.
But besides working 9 hour days for 5 days a week, part of the darkness of that time came from having no friends or family. We made a couple of friends in Barrie, but for the most part my wife and I were alone. All the people I worked with were about a decade older than I was, and all my friends from school were still back in Ottawa. In the beginning of 2001, I started looking for new work in my old neighbourhood and I was fortunate to get hired quickly. It was the best move of my life despite getting laid off seven months later and going through a very hard time of unemployment.
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