When I took the job it was billed as an 8-to-5 Monday-to-Friday gig as the managed services “help desk” guy. This should have precluded any chance of an eleven-hour no-lunch workday.

And yet, this is precisely what happened today.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to eat my second meal of the day, twelve hours after my first, and go fall into bed. Thank you.

Wait, what? It’s November already?

Well, it would hardly do to botch the challenge on the very first day, would it? So, let me tell you about the fun things going on in my world lately:

• Even when I get enough sleep, I don’t get enough sleep. Last night was not an example of my getting enough sleep, however. You’d think that traipsing up and down our designated annual Halloween street in the chilling wind would have made me tired enough to sleep like the (un)dead, but no. Never underestimate my ability to fail at the simple task of losing consciousness for anything close to seven hours a night.
• Speaking of All Hallow’s Eve, I think the kids had a good time last night. Alex’s costume turned out to be something on the order of a Rorschach test. He was supposed to be a “bookworm,” with painted on glasses and a big book in his hands, open for reading as he absentmindedly mumbled “Trick or treat” from door to door. Yet, nobody really picked up on that. Several people assumed his costume was “devoted student,” including a couple of suggestions that he was a Reedie. Two suggested he was either portraying or reading Harry Potter. One actually recognized the book in his hands, namely the massive, complete Hitchhiker’s Guide volume. We had a number of good laughs, anyway. That’s the whole point. Well, that and candy. We mustn’t forget the candy.
• Apparently I’m the go-to guy for doing nigh-impossible things with fussy laptops. Unfortunately, unlike the last two times, this time I think I’m stumped. I can’t sync a 200 MB Outlook data file over an ISDN connection, at least not within a couple of hours. And since I told the laptop to try exactly that, now I can’t make anything else work. That’ll teach me to do what I’m told, won’t it?
• How’s the job in general? I’ve entered that wonderfully awkward phase in which I sort of know what I’m supposed to do, but actually learning all of the fiddly bits (such as: which clients behave like what, the accepted method of creating logins, best practices for service request creation and management) is completely defeating my poor little brain. I don’t feel like my coworkers think I’m a total waste of oxygen (yet), but I’m quite keenly frustrated nonetheless. I spent nine years in one kind of job, and this is… something else entirely. I’m not terribly confident in my ability to adjust to this style of doing things.
• Cohabitating with Kyla has reduced many of the negative aspects of our relationship while exacerbating a few others, though much of that can be chalked up to a general lack of funds in addition to living in a fairly confined space. My room has all of my stuff in it, which makes working with our combined stuff rather entertaining at times. It’ll be a big relief when she has a place that’s truly her own. Not that I mind having her around so much of the time, to be clear, but my room just isn’t big enough for the both of us.
• My energy levels in general have been very, very low since about… oh… June? I’ve enjoyed brief periods of recovery in the last couple of months but it never lasts. Enjoyment itself is at a loss lately. I don’t have the drive to do very much, and often when I can work up the energy I don’t end up satisfied with the results. (Wow, this could be read in an entirely naughty fashion, couldn’t it? Well, don’t. I’m not talking about that, at least not specifically, so get your mind out of the gutter.) I don’t know what to do about this. The multivitamins may be helping, but who’s to say? I don’t want to end up the lifeless, apathetic loser that I was in my early teens, so, what do I do? I don’t know, and I’m trying to care.

Let’s hope that I haven’t used up my allotment of words for the entire month just on this one posting. I have at least twenty-nine more entries to write, after all!

Not that I’ve been a frantic, every-day poster lately, but don’t expect much from me this coming week. Tomorrow afternoon I head to Denver (where they’re experiencing temperatures merely “around” 90 degrees, but they get thunderstorms as a bonus) and I won’t return until Thursday night… after which I’ll turn around and go to work bright and early Friday morning.

This is a training excursion for my new boss and me. He’s been using the system in question for a while now; I’ve been using it for about three weeks. Guess who’s going to be taking notes like crazy? Luckily I bought new pens and a notebook just for this occasion. I also picked up some other travel supplies, so there’s a chance I’ll actually be ready for this little jaunt.

Oh, and I took the Leatherman Micra and the Swiss Army USB Drive out of my pants pocket. No point arguing with those friendly folks at the airport about whether or not I’d use them to hijack a plane, right?

I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping this thing updated like I originally stated I would at the beginning of the year. Events have run away with me since mid-March, and until I settle in at my new job I’m probably going to continue experiencing low energy levels coupled with high anxiety levels. I no longer go into a complete panic attack at the mere thought of going to work, but I’m certainly far from comfortable in my new role. I labor constantly with a sneaking suspicion that I’m simply not suited for the job. Not that I won’t give it my best shot, mind you. I want this to work, and not just because I don’t want to be unemployed again. If I can really settle into this job, it’ll be an awfully cool gig.

Which brings us back to the need for training in the main software system I use to do my job. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The product is called “VMware.” It is, in effect, a server that allows you to host a number of virtual computers on a single machine. The geek value for something like this is through the roof, which makes the following instructions found in the upgrade documentation terribly amusing.

8. Select your mouse.

Here are some helpful mouse identification hints:

• If the connector is round, your mouse is a PS/2 or a Bus mouse.
• If the connector is trapezoidal with nine holes, it is a serial mouse.
• If the connector is a flat rectangle with a slot, it is a USB mouse.

I’ll grant you that their instructions are wholly accurate. However, I question the judgement of the person who thinks (s)he has any business at all installing or upgrading a sophisticated piece of software but doesn’t know how to tell one type of pointing device from another!

This week marks the 17th anniversary of my arrival in Portland. I moved here from Concrete, WA when I was 17 years old, so I’ve made the Rose City my home for an entire half of my life now. Before Concrete (the town in which I spent my senior year) I spent a brief time in Anacortes, WA preceeded by another brief stint in Des Moines, WA. Oddly enough, my girlfriend currently lives in Des Moines, albeit not on a small boat like I did. My junior year (and my absolute favorite year of school, ever) was spent in Bellevue, WA and my sophomore year took place in Kent, WA.

We moved to Kent from Hillsboro, OR after Mom hooked up with her newest husband at the time. Now, here’s where it gets weird. I attended Poynter Middle School, located just off Cornell Road. Our apartment was right across Cornell from the school’s athletic field. (I used to watch Robotech in the morning until the moment the credits rolled, at which point I’d grab my things and scamper at high speed so as not to be late for school.)

Yesterday I started work at Resource One, which is located… well, let’s just say it’s incredibly close. Check this out:

(Image courtesy of Google Maps, with minor edits by Yours Truly)

The green arrow is my current workplace. The blue arrow marks the approximate location (it was a long time ago, so maybe I got the wrong building) of the apartment that Mom, Sis and I lived in… about twenty years ago. The purple arrow indicates the middle school I attended at that time. (For reference, if you could “scroll” the image above so you could see what’s just off to the right, you’d find the Hillsboro airport.)

Consider that I’ve barely set foot in Hillsboro more than a couple of times since I moved away, and then consider that I’m now working a figurative stone’s throw from where I used to live. Freaky, isn’t it?

I face a number of challenges in my new job. For instance, I need to learn one arcane system around which our tasking and billing revolve and another slightly less arcane system around which my primary job description revolves. I also need to learn and become comfortable with the process by which I accept, resolve and document individual tasks. There’s also the matter of tracking what I’m doing (and for whom) for any given quarter-hour of the workday.

All of this pales in comparison to my biggest challenge, however. You see, it turns out that my schedule is to work from 8:00am to 5:00pm each weekday. Factor in the hour and a half of transit time (walk to MAX station, wait for and catch MAX, ride MAX for about 50 minutes, walk from station to office) and that means I need to get out of bed no later than twenty minutes after five o’clock in the morning.

5:20 in the A.M.? Are you kidding me? I’m going to be a zombie! I may be getting home at nearly the same time that I used to when I worked at “that other place,” but I’m getting out of bed a whole two hours earlier.

Well, maybe I’ll adjust beautifully. I won’t know until I try. Suffice to say that the prospect is daunting, which when added to all of the other daunting parts of my new job results in my having to fight down the occasional wave of feeling utterly out of my depth.

We’ll find out, won’t we?