How I Stay Focused?

January 8, 2011January 8, 2011 ~ JodiLea

Well, to answer the question – about as good as my camera does.

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Some photos are crisp and balanced. Some photos look like they were taken during an earthquake. My granddaughter is even gorgeous during an earthquake, don’t you think?

I can usually focus on a task in my office at work. Ask Ed, whose office is down the hall from mine. It’s like I have blinders on. People pass by my office, break time comes and goes, I forget to eat, I lose all track of time. Ed laughs at me. For some reason my “stress mode” as he calls it, is entertaining. Whatever.

Most of the time any distraction whatsoever will derail my train of thought and I have to wait for the next one. Trying to post every day has been a challenge and I should write in the morning instead of at 11:00pm when I am worn out and ready for bed. I am a morning person. Even if I am up watching movies with my mom because she can’t sleep and needs company until 3:00am I am awake by 7:00am. It sucks on days I want to sleep in.

Working at home (actually my mother’s home) has been an experience. Basically, if I can’t fit in my days work before mom wakes up, not much will get done. Constant focus interruptuss, if you will. So, because my employer is paying me to work I do that in the morning and I run out of time to blog. Until late in the evening when my brain is practically useless. Yawn. I will try to focus on a solution to this problem.

In the morning.

The Interview From Hell – Part II

January 7, 2011January 7, 2011 ~ JodiLea

Previously in Part I . . .

I felt confident and excited as I approached the Operations Center where my interview would take place. I was also terrified. What if a more tech-y person wanted the job? What if they laughed at my grunt computer skills?

I opened the heavy metal door and entered the Operations Center. The entire Staff was sitting around the table, waiting. All 15 of them. Oh man! It was going to be a gang interview.

I could not tell you all that happened. The hour and 1/2 is a blur now. Only 2 questions I remember being asked, and I remember them because they were so strange.

1) “Do you have an aversion to food?” I thought this a dumb question to ask someone who was over-weight. Of course I answered “No”. It was obvious I loved food.

2) “Would you be willing to join our softball team? This struck me as a trick question, and I had to ponder this a bit. Flash backs of high school gym class and hating softball because no one ever wanted the “Queen of Fouls” on their team. Being made fun of because when I whacked the ball I would take off running, never quite getting what made a foul ball a foul ball.

I had to be honest with these people. “Well,” I said. ” It would probably be in the best interest of your team if I joined a different one.”

A day went by. Then two days. I did not hear anything from the Ops Center or my supervisor. Was the “gang” still interviewing people? For MY job? I managed to wait until a week after the interview to call and speak with the woman who would be the supervisor for MY job. She told me that they had finished the interview process and would be making a decision soon.

Three days later, I called and asked if I was still in the running. Panic was starting to set in. What was taking so long? Why must they torture me? What level of Hell is this?

It took 2 more weeks (and descending to deeper levels of Hell) for them to finally decide. My supervisor called me that evening at home to tell me the outcome. She knew I was having a break down over this and she told me she did not want me to have to wait until morning for the news. I am sure she was relieved to get me off her back.

I was officially offered MY job. The best decision they and I ever made! I still work for the Ops Center. After I completed my Computer Science degree I moved into a technical position for them. This June I will have been with the “gang” 17 years.

It will take a very large crow-bar to remove me from here.

The Interview from Hell – Part I

January 7, 2011 ~ JodiLea

I ran out of time and it is after midnight now, so I missed posting Jan 6th. This bums me greatly. However, to make up for this I am going to continue this saga later today. After a good nights sleep.

My current position “expired” when the project I worked for ran out of funding. So, I needed a job and soon. Every interview for open positions that I had so far had gone OK. It was the jobs that sucked. I wanted to find a position that was technical as well as administrative. I had been ruined by my former project. I was the administrative person for a group of software programmers. They let me do some very low-level (OK, grunt) computer tasks for them and I loved it. I cannot explain why, but I did.

Now I wanted to work with actual data, keep learning UNIX. The thought of doing only admin tasks again depressed me. I found out about an opening for an Operations Assistant. Admin and technical support for an Operations Center. I lucked out and got a tour of the place before I applied. The “Center” was housed in a very old, very broken down trailer. It did not even have running water. The carpet was sort of gross. It was not a large trailer, so multiple file cabinets were stacked up in the middle of the room and these were nearly as tall as I was.

The place was noisy. All around the edges of the room were different kinds of equipment. One monitor showed looping weather satellite images. One piece of equipment constantly beeped. A deep computer generated (and very loud) voice would make an announcement once in a while – in a language unknown to me. A group of computer stations were also in the middle of the room (next to the cabinets). They displayed data and graphics – also in a language unknown to me.

I found MY job! So what if I have to go to the building next door to pee? The jobs in the swanky new buildings could not compete with this one.This was home.

Now I needed to convince my new boss that it was MY job. I was perfect for the position in my own mind. I felt confident and excited as I approached the Operations Center where my interview would take place. I was also terrified. What if a more tech-y person wanted the job? What if they laughed at my grunt computer skills?

to be continued…