I didn’t want to say anything about this too soon — I tend to get a little too excited about things before they’re actually happening — but now that i’ve been at it for almost a full week, I figured I’d actually say something about it.
Life at work has taken a definite turn for the better!
Last week I was about ready to turn in my resignation and ask my temp agency to find me another posting. While the work hasn’t been bad, there have been two main annoyances that have been getting to me. First off, the pay is a lot lower than I’d like it to be, and secondly, since I’ve just been your basic bindery monkey (binding books, cutting paper, laminating, drilling holes, etc.), not only was I not learning anything new, but I wasn’t even using the knowledge I had. Not something that’s likely to keep me interested for very long, and I’d pretty much reached the end of my rope. So on Wednesday, I was on my way to the boss’s office to talk to him about this and see if there was anything that could be done about either (or preferably both) of these situations.
On my way there, I got pulled aside, and asked if I knew anything about HTML. Since I’ve been playing with this website since about 1995 I was pretty cofindent in telling them that I had some idea of how it worked…and suddenly, I was a lot less interested in whining to my boss.
Since this last Monday, I’ve been neck-deep in HTML, CSS, and XML, working on helping to code the pages for a web-based job submission tool being built by Xerox for use within Microsoft for sending jobs to the Xerox print shops. They’ve given me a week or two to ‘prove myself’ so that they could be sure that I actually was able to contribute to the project and wasn’t just talking out of my rear when I said that I was good with HTML, and then we get to start negotiating a raise. This doesn’t look like it’ll be too hard to do, as I’ve made a lot of progress over the past four days with the two pages that I was given to start with.
One fun side effect of diving into the world of code has been that it’s kicked me back into full-on geek mode. I’ve had a few things bouncing around that I’ve wated to work on here on my site, but I just hadn’t gotten around to getting started. Now that geek mode is back in gear, I’ll be diving back into those projects. Should be interesting to see how this goes….