Recently in Work Category

After 5 years of faithful service and surviving more bounces off the payment than I care to recall, my faithful Blackberry 8700 is falling apart at the seams, literally:

While the holes in the bottom have been growing in size steadily over the past several months, their only noticeable impact had been occasionally causing the jagged edges to catch on my shirt when I was returning the phone to its belt clip. This past week, however, after yet another cringe-inducing bounce off a marble floor, I noticed the Delete key was loose and the cracks had spread further up the case into the keyboard. I now how to hold the case together with one hand any time I press the Return key as without doing so, the Delete key will either skew like it did in the photo, or pop out completely.

I'm now waiting for a replacement, which my pal in IT says will be an iPhone 4. Pardon my skepticism, but I'll believe that when I have it in my hands.I also hope there's an extended warranty on my new phone, because while I'm certain that I won't be wearing it on a belt clip, I'm reasonably certain (99.999%) that I will drop this new phone.

Wish me luck!

My wife brought me this cute little chia pet-like plant thing for Easter. I watered it and left it in the window at work. After a few days, it had a couple of sprouts:

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and fell to the ground into a large field.

While he was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on him.

As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, he began to realize how warm he was. The dung was actually thawing him out!

A turkey was chatting with a bull.

"I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree," sighed the turkey, "but I haven't got the energy."

"Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?" replied the bull. "They're packed with nutrients."

The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree.

An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing.

A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, "Can I also sit like you and do nothing?"

The eagle answered: "Sure, why not."

A sales rep, an administration clerk, and their manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp. They rub it and a Genie comes out.

The Genie says, "I'll give each of you just one wish."

"Me first! Me first!" says the admin clerk. "I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world."

Puff! She's gone.

"Me next! Me next!" says the sales rep. "I want to be in Hawaii, relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life."

Puff! He's gone.

A priest was driving back to his parish and saw a nun from his offered a nun a lift. She got in and crossed her legs, forcing her gown to reveal a leg. The priest nearly had an accident.

After regaining control of his car, he stealthily slid his hand up her leg.

The nun said, "Father, remember Psalm 129?"

The priest reluctantly removed his hand.

The following series of posts are "management lessons" that my father forwarded me this week. I think they are worthy of sharing here:

Lesson 1

A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower, when the doorbell rings.

The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs.

When she opens the door, there stands Bob , the next-door neighbor.

Before she says a word, Bob says, "I'll give you $800 to drop that towel."

After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob, after a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 and leaves.

As most readers of this blog know I've been working pretty hard since joining my current company in May 2004. I'm pleased to say that my efforts have been rewarded and today I was promoted to the position of Documentation Manager.

The promotion goes into effect on April 1, a better April Fool's Day gift I could not ask for. Hopefully the joke will not be on me when I see what increase in compensation I get for this promotion, other than the extra work and less time for marathon foosball matches. It will also help supplement my saving for a house/condo and my upcoming vacation.

The Engineering group I work with had a Yankee gift swap today to celebrate the holidays. For those not familiar with the concept, it's pretty simple: say there's 15 people in the group and everyone brings a wrapped gift of a set value, say no more than $10. Each person pulls a number from a bowl, then the person with #1 selects a gift and unwraps it. The person with #2 selects a gift, unwraps it, and then can swap with #1. Each person thereafter picks a gift and has the option of swapping with any of the other opened gifts. After #15 selects his or her present, the person with #1 has the option of swapping with anyone else's. Believe it or not, this was the most coveted gift at today's Yankee swap. It was swapped about six times between the 14 people who participated:

The "winner" of this gift decided to share it with the whole group by hanging it from the ceiling outside our Vice President's office. Apologies for the poor quality, I took the photo with my cell phone.

This week I'm in Santa Barbara, CA on business. This is my first trip to California so I brought my camera to snap a few photos.

Here's State Street in downtown Santa Barbara. The city is absolutely beautiful with a unique combination of southwestern Spanish-influenced architecture and the tropical delights of the Pacific ocean breezes blowing in from the south.

I went for a drive this afternoon with a co-worker to scout out houses--he's transferring to this office in the next few months. On the drive we saw a uniquely California thing: a line of 10 or so Lamborghinis and Ferraris racing up Highway 101:

After 21 straight days of working, I'm happy to report that my project has shipped today. I'm now going to take a few days off to recoup and recharge.

I don't know what I'll do but that's fine with me. Happy holiday weekend to all.

I've been working really hard the last three weeks on a large project at work. It ships at the end of this month so, other than the furniture delivery, I haven't had any time to update the blog. I'm hoping to take a trip over the 4th of July holiday weekend, assuming of course that I get this beast out the door.

I've now completed Day 2 of my new job and have to say I'm very happy with it. The people are very friendly, my boss seems to be both very smart and a genuinely nice person, the facilities and IT staff had me set up with my office (read "cube with a nice window"), and I survived my first two hour meeting by only losing consciousness three times, and most likely it wasn't for more than a few minutes.

Seriously though, it seems like a great place. I'm going to four days of training next week for the company's older product, then two days the following week for the new flagship product which is what I'll likely spend most of my time on. There's no shortage of doc work here, so it seems like whatever projects I tackle and finish will make a great impact for the customers and the company.

So, tongue firmly planted in cheek, I am digging in and holding out against hope that the honeymoon period here lasts for a while!

I'm happy to announce that I've accepted an offer for a full-time senior technical writer position with Authoria in Waltham. They have a great team of people, I have a dynamic boss who I look forward to working with, and a really interesting product using cutting edge technology. I'm very excited to get back into the workforce! I start on Monday, May 3rd!

Last Friday, while doing laps in the job market's icy waters waiting for the glacial-like financial services company to tell me what's going on with the contract I applied for, I received an e-mail from my friend who works there about a job lead with a different division. He forwarded my resume to the hiring manager and sure enough, on Monday I got a call, scheduled an interview, and went in late this morning.

Getting ready for my interview, I checked my e-mail and found an e-mail from the hiring manager for the first contract in my in-box:

"We've had an indefinite delay in our hiring. As you can imagine, budgets are tight these days. If you have another opportunity on the horizon my advice to you is to pursue it. I don't know when I'll be able to reopen my search for someone."

He offered to recommend me for any other positions that I cared to apply to within the company, which I thought was incredibly kind of him. I'll send him an e-mail on Wednesday thanking him for the update and his recommendation offer.

Now, about today's interview...

Though it feels like a year, it's only been 10 days since my second interview with the financial services company. I hadn't heard anything from them so, as job-seekers are prone to do, I began assuming the worse-case scenario: the hiring manager has had my wireless number blocked and reported me to their IT team as an adult-content spammer. This morning, however, the dark skies of delusion parted and reality shone a bright light in the form of a curt, but informative e-mail from the hiring manager:

"We'll be delayed into next week making our decision on a candidate for our Editor position. Some last minute budgeting issues."

This contract is with the institutional investment side of the company which means that despite the appearance of having autonomy to rapidly make hiring decisions, it's still part of a large group within enormous organization. So what their staff sees as full steam ahead appears to me, the job-seeker whose unemployment benefits are dwindling, as moving at little more than glacial speed.

I had my second interview at the financial services company in Marlborough, MA tonight and I think it went pretty well. I met with the hiring manager again and we covered almost the exact material we discussed previously. I also met with an editor who works at that office and she seemed pretty nice. She's been a contractor at this company since 1999 and has worked in this group since last April.

I didn't have as good a feeling about it as after my first interview but that's probably due to the realization that if I get this job that once again, I'll have a job.

*Groan*

Even so, I still want it. I should hear from them by the end of next week.

Today I received an e-mail from the hiring manager at the financial services company I had met with last week. He invited me in for a second-round interview to meet his boss and a member of his team. The interview is on Tuesday, March 16th.

This sounds promising, wish me luck.

I had an interview for a six-month contract on Friday, March 5th, with a large financial services company. Their headquarters are in Boston, but this position is at a facility in Marlborough, about 35 miles west of Boston. I think the interview went well. The three phase project sounds pretty interesting: first, leading a team to decide the what and where of using identical data field labels across a range of product web sites which all serve slightly different groups of customers. Next, mine the sites for terminology, compile a glossary, and then help the content teams update their sites; and finally, set and implement standards for language in instructional and procedural text on all of the sites.

Okay, I'll admit it, this probably only sounds "interesting" to me.

Received an e-mail from the National Science Foundation (NSF) today regarding the writer position I had applied for back in December. It was a standard GFY form letter.

As mentioned in my post on January 26th, I applied to Intercultura, a school in Heredia, Costa Rica. This afternoon I received a response from their English Department Director saying that they are not hiring right now, but suggested contacting her again in the May/June timeframe for positions opening in August.

While this is a bit disappointing, I am buoyed by the fact that this is the first response I have received from any application that I've made since leaving Spain in November. Even better, this was from a school's English department director which means that I now have established communication with her and have a reference point for future contact. Yeah!

The market in Costa Rica seems to be warming up. Today I found a new job posting and applied immediately. The job is with C.P.I. English School in San Joaqu?n de Flores, a suburb of Heredia.

The little bit of research I was able to do on various web sites revealed that this school primarily recruits volunteers for English teaching positions, but I'm hoping that they are looking to hire someone to provide professional guidance to the deep-pocketed travelling do-gooders who spend their vacations teaching English. :)

Today I was exploring more job opportunities, branching out away from the three or four popular ESL job web sites and I discovered what looks like a great school called Intercultura in Heredia, Costa Rica. On the first page describing their ESL program was a quote that really struck a chord with me:

"Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs. I again realized that we were not different people speaking separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues."
    - Nelson Mandela

This was followed by an explanation:
The words of Nelson Mandela reflect the ideals of the English Department at Intercultura. The English department was developed in order to give back to the community, and to aid in closing the communication gap between cultures on a local and international scale.

Intercultura sounds like the kind of place where I want to work, so I sent an e-mail with my C.V. and photo--as requested--to the hiring director tonight. Wish me luck!

Facing the aforementioned fiscal realities of going abroad in January 2004, I have applied for Writer-Editor positions at the National Science Foundation and NASA, both in the Washington, DC area. I liked the sound of these jobs because they involve writing things other than user and programmer documentation, which is what I've been doing for the last few years. I'm optimistic that the work environments will be better than what I've experienced in my last two jobs.

Upon my return last month I was hoping to find a teaching job overseas that started with the new language school term in January, however I have quickly come to realize that making only $500 a month while teaching in Eastern Europe or South America is not enough to live on while I still have a $275 monthly student loan payment to make--damn that Master's degree!

Last night I spent some time in the Internet cafe in the basement of the Burger King in Picadilly Circus and did some job searching. I had time enough to do some adequate research on a few companies and the cities where they are based. The short of it is that I have submitted an application to a company in Poland who currently has positions open in Krakow and Warsaw. I'll keep you posted as to what happens. I still haven't heard back from the Universidad del Mar in Oxaca, Mexico to whom I submitted an application last week.

A company, feeling it was time for a shakeup, hires a new CEO. This new boss is determined to rid the company of all slackers. On a tour of the facilities, he notices a guy leaning on a wall. The room is full of workers and the new CEO wants to let them know he means business! He walks up to the guy and asks, "How much money do you make a week?"

Undaunted, the young fellow looks at him and replies, "I make $300 a week. Why?"

The CEO then hands the guy $300 in cash and screams, "Here's a week's pay, now GET OUT and don't come back!"

My buddy Rob just called to let me know about something he read on the web today: The HR wizards at Allstate Insurance released a memo to employees this week describing a new feature on their internal intranet: an automatic self-termination process. The details are described in an internal memo that someone posted on internalmemos.com.

This is one of my favorite quotes about technical writing:

"Technical writing is a form of brain damage caused by an over-development of the corpus callosum--a sort of cerebral cross-wiring. It manifests itself as a compulsion to explain complex things so that mere motals can understand them."

- William Horton
Writer's Pocket Almanack

This is a joke I received from my Dad back in February. I think it accurately portrays the evils and failures of managed health care:

A doctor, a nurse, and an HMO manager were at the Pearly Gates when St. Peter asked them to identify themselves. The doctor said, "I was a pediatric spine surgeon. I helped kids overcome deformities." St. Peter said, "You may enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

The nurse said, "I was a hospice nurse. I helped make people comfortable as the end approached." St. Peter said, "You may enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

The HMO manager said, "I was an HMO manager. I helped people get cost-effective health care." St. Peter said, "You may enter the Kingdom of Heaven." As the HMO manager started forward, St. Peter added, "But you are limited to a three-day stay. After that, you can go to hell."

Company sadist,
Five hours, no agenda,
Dilbert's just too close.

I've recently returned to work after being out on disability for two months and was horrified to find the state of the Doc team I work with. Here's a haiku I wrote to describe it:

They stumble around,
spirits drained from their bodies,
deNovis writers.