"You’ve been promoted to Senior Application Engineer."

Well that was unexpected…but quite good news indeed.  The bad news was that I was only getting a pat-on-the-head raise, but that can be dealt with later.  Overall, I was impressed.

So imagine my surprise this morning when the boss starts doling out paperwork to the team that we are all now "Network Engineers."  Ok, still Senior Network Engineer, but..wtf, mate?  I have a hard enough time explaining that for historic reasons, a CAH Application Engineer has nothing to do with writing code.  (I implement Neat Third Party Stuff into our medication dispensing and infusion products.)  The rationale isn’t clear, but at least it’s plausible.  But making the jump to Network Engineer is such a misnomer that it knocks off a valuable chunk of professional credibility right off the bat.  Not that I’m looking for a new job any time soon, but explaining this 5 or 6 times at Lunch 2.0 every month would get old fast.

Calling myself a network engineer is about as accurate as calling the HR group who championed this initiative a team of janitors.  The only "networking" I do is the social kind.  I don’t know if I have any real input into HR’s R&D roadmapping, but I’m at least going to bring up my concerns at our group lunch tomorrow.  And if all else fails, I’ll just tell everyone I’m making twitter for nurses.

Some members have been offered positions in Systems Engineering, some are going to Release Engineering, and the boss wants to take me and a few others with him to an Operations team that handles remote access, monitoring, and other one off projects that are supposed to generally make life easier for our field engineers.

This is really sudden news, but I have to admit I’ve always had an eye on that team because of how disorganized they’ve been, and have strangely felt like I could do some good there. Boss feels the same way, but isn’t sure how he wants to handle this situation yet. Regardless, I told him I’ve a vested interest in moving wherever he does.

Huh.

EDIT: The group I may transition to would be taking in those existing operations projects, as well as others. The group’s working title is “Solutions Engineering.” And it will only be created if Mark takes it.

Got some really big mustard fans at the office (myself included).

http://www.weather.com/weather/local/27834

But what the fuck else is in North Carolina? Greenville, specifically. I’m monitoring weather.com like a hawk to check to see if another hurricane is going to hit, as Greenville is quite close to the ocean.

So I will be a bit out of pocket for a while, especially since Sprint’s email to SMS gateway has been down and I’m not brave enough to try to explain that to a tier 1 representative. There’s wired jacks in the hotel room, though, so I can catch up at night.

I will now continue to amuse myself by watching the retarded guy next to me curse and throw things around. =]

The past couple of weeks have been pretty exciting, though. Through some stroke of luck that I’m still not sure I completely understand, I’ve had the opportunity to design, implement, and now present a new communications system to all the 200ish employees and managers in my department and our sister center in quebec . It’s based entirely on irc, running on a debian box under my desk. Management wanted a way for people to be able to communicate realtime, and thankfully my idea was chosen over some stupid expensive corporate solution.

I had to write a custom mirc script to make getting everyone setup and sorted into their proper groups completely idiot-proof, and I also had to learn vb to give people an easy way to get around some windows routing funkiness.

What’s funny though…presenting to everyone here in San Diego was a breeze; I tend to get nervous talking to groups of unknown people unless I’m really excited and confident about my topic. But with as much time as I’ve spend on cam in front of thousands of people, the teleconferences with Quebec made me nervous as hell! I didn’t like that nearly as much as being face-to-face (which is totally backwards, usually I feel more in control when I’m on cam). It may have also been part of the dynamics of that call center. I mean, I’m sure they’re good people, but I swear I could get more feedback from a bucket.

So anyway, my supervisor is absolutely tickled (and tells me how pleased he is every chance he gets), everyone knows my name, and I”VE BEEN GETTING PAID TO BE ON IRC FOR THE PAST MONTH!! I’m so spoiled. Going back to my normal job is gonna suck. =]

I -do- really like my job, but…I’m starting to get itchy. The hours (5am-2pm tues-sat) have really been taking a toll on me and dan both. Not even three hours after he gets home, I’m ready to go to bed. And we can’t really schedule anything neat on the weekends, either. He’s telecommuting every other Monday, which I like. But still, I need a new shift. And when shift bids go through, I have more of a chance of getting worse than I do of getting something better.

And I’m still a temp! I make decent money (enough that I’ve paid off all my moving debt and am looking at buying a new laptop), but I have no benefits and no seniority. The system is so silly here…getting moved from temp to permanent has little to do with your performance: a permanent position has to open up first. There are people who have been stuck as temps for a whole year until they get ‘officially’ hired, who then are on the books as having been employed only since their official hire date. Which is balls. There -are- changes in the works, but no one knows when or what will happen to the current temps. I’m not worried per se, but I’d rather stuff happen sooner than later.

I’m rambling. But I’m so tired and today is so slow that if I don’t at least keep my fingers moving I’m going to fall out of my chair. Besides, I haven’t had an opportunity to make a good post in a long time. =]

But my life really does consist mostly of work and keeping dan out of trouble. And I like it that way. Dan’s awesome and I want to keep him forever.

We’ll be finding a new place to live come October. We’re currently debating whether we want to still have roommates or try to have a place just the two of us. I’m leaning towards just the two of us, but we can get a much nicer place the more people are living there. Iono, we’ll see.

10am, only four more hours to go. I’m gonna go back to refreshing my rss feeds in hopes that engadget releases some information about this.

Winnar! \0/

I highly suggest buying Confused Raisins. Dey’s good shit, yo.

I wish I could think of a smiley grinnier than =D. Today is a good day.

Oh yeah, first job interview tomorrow.  Kinda.  One of Dan’s friends is a recruiter who is going to try to get me started at a place working 24-hr tech support at 16.50/hr (6 month contract).  I need experience something awful, so it’ll be good for that plus decent money, even though it’s not exactly what I’d love to be doing and will have wonky hours.  Still, a job’s a job.