Personal

It looks like Dave Winer and John Teggatz have all the cold weather that Dad is complaining he’s missing in Anchorage.

Dad also mentioned a couple articles from the Anchorage Daily News about the warm weather up there.

But it will be a long time before people on both sides of the Alaska Range forget what for many has been the strangest winter in memory — especially over the first part of February, supposedly one of the coldest months of the year.

Days of rain. Massive overflow on rivers. Fairbanks drivers “playing car hockey” on roads glazed with black ice. People taking 10-minute flights to the next village because ground travel was nearly impossible. Potholes sprouting like pussy willows.

Thanks to a persistent southerly flow of air, Fischer said, Fairbanks experienced its warmest average daily mean temperature on record — 13.6 degrees — for the 133 days from Oct. 1 through Feb. 10.

South of the Alaska Range, the wacky winter has forced the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to change its restart next month from Wasilla to Fairbanks.

“People are really starving for snow right now,” said John Wilbur, chief ranger for the Alaska State Parks Susitna/Denali ranger district. “In the Willow area, there’s no recreation at all.”

Meanwhile, here in Seattle, it’s cloudy and 41. Pretty average for this time of year, from what I understand. Yeah, I think I’ll be sticking around in the Pacific Northwest for a while.

(And on an entirely unrelated note: I really wish that Dave’s RSS feed had individual posts linked to their permalinks. Some link to the permalink on his page, some link to the first external link in the post, and some don’t have any link associated with them at all. It’s a pain in the butt. Just my opinion.)

My boss got back to me with Xerox’s employment offer. What did they use to try to entice me into the Xerox family?

A position as a Xerox temp (as opposed to a third-party temp contracted to Xerox) with an \$11/hr pay rate (I’m getting \$11.20 through the temp agency) with no holiday or vacation pay (which I get through the temp agency) and no medical benefits (which I’m eligible for through the temp agency).

Needless to say, I turned them down, and re-started another 18-month cycle as a temp contracting to Xerox. My boss is still optimistic about future possibilities, but he made it clear without actually saying so that he thought it would be in my best interest to do what I did and stick with the temp agency. So, for now, I’m still where I was before, with no real changes for better or for worse. Guess I’ll keep keeping my eyes open.

Anybody know of any Dream Job openings?

Looks like I’m working late tonight. I’ll be here until about midnight or so, and catching a ride home with one of the other guys in the store. Busy busy busy — bleah.

On the upside, I finally got a chance to talk with my boss about my possible future with Xerox, a conversation that I’d been itching for for a while now. When working for Xerox, a temp such as myself can be used for a maximum of 18 months before the situation needs to be re-evaluated. I’ve known that the tail end of my 18 months was coming up fairly quickly, but wasn’t at all sure about what I’d be looking at when it it. Some of my questions finally got answered today.

It started when my boss called me into his office and handed me a Xerox job application. It turns out that my deadline day is February 8^th^ — this Saturday — and if something wasn’t done by then, I’d end up locked out of the pay system. I went ahead and filled it out (getting a paycheck is, overall, a fairly nice thing), and we spent some time talking about my current and future options.

The current situation boils down to this: between now and Friday (since the eighth is this Saturday) Xerox has to make me some sort of offer for employment with them. Exactly what that offer is going to be is unclear at the moment, and depends very much upon a big numbers game within the company involving not just headcount for this printshop, but headcount for the region. Worst case scenario, they’ll offer me a ‘temp-to-hire’ position as a Xerox employee (rather than through a temp agency), best case scenario, they’ll offer me a full time permanent position. Either way, if I don’t like the offer they present me with, I have the option of declining. Should I decline, than they can either restart my 18 month cycle as a temp, or I can choose to wave goodbye and find something else.

I asked about what options might lie for me if I stayed with Xerox — as I’ve mentioned (groused over [whined about]) at times, nearly a decade of working in printshops is quite enough, and I’m getting more interested in finding other avenues to explore. My boss indicated that not only is there generally a good amount of movement within Xerox, but one of the things he’d tried to stress on the paperwork determining what offer Xerox will be making me was my versatility here. In the time I’ve been here, I’ve shown myself not only able to use any of the bindery equipment that I’m technically here for, but also able to run any one of the production printers, both black and white and color, not to mention putting in a few months re-coding an internal website — and doing all this on the base salary of your basic “bindery monkey.” So, while timing is always a bit of a question, it does look like I wouldn’t be stuck “pushing the green button” if I chose to stick around.

There are also various training options that I could take advantage of down the line, from internal training classes to possibly going back to school with Xerox’s help financially (on the assumption that whatever I’m going to school for would benefit Xerox in some way — networking or technology classes they’d be likely to pony up for, underwater basket weaving I’d have to pay for out of my pocket).

So, all in all, it was a good talk, and I ended up a bit more optimistic than I had been before. I’m still somewhat undecided, and definitely keeping my option to just renew my contract employee status and then look for something else in the back of my head, but at the very least, it’s worth seeing what my options are and what Xerox offers me. As long as I’m at least maintaining my status quo, it’ll be worth thinking about — maybe I’ll get lucky and things might even improve a bit. Who knows?

As before, though, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.