Moving Over, Candy and Really Good Lunches
I took my first step into the IS department today. I knew that today would be the day but I avoided it with all my might, instead completing every last shitty task I thought for sure I’d dump on the successor to my current position. But eventually the moment came when I could procrastinate no longer and so with a deep sigh I pushed my chair away from my desk and walked across the hall.
I actually didn’t intend to stay and work. I planned to ask the IS director what he wanted me to start on and then hightail it back to my safe little cubicle and return to active project avoidance. But when he suggested that I could actually stay and work in IS, I had no good reason to refuse, and so stay I did.
I quickly realized what a difference a location can make. When sitting in my old cubicle I very much felt like I was still in my old job and that I really needed to do that job as opposed to taking on responsibilities for my new job. In fact, when I contemplated the thought of taking on new work, I felt overwhelmed and very unhappy, which was a significant reason why I resisted making the transition in the first place. But once I was sitting safely ensconced in my new job, my old job fell away like clothes at a nude beach and after a few minutes I was bare naked, frolicking in the sand and couldn’t even remember that I had ever worked anywhere else.
Of course, they did ask me to put my clothes back on and to stop getting sand in the keyboards but I didn’t care because by then I had been blinded by the IS department’s claim to popularity, their bottomless candy jar filled with peanut butter cups and kit kats and three musketeers and m&ms and mounds bars and so much more!
I did not have a chance to sample the candy (and I definitely was not going to be the fat girl who dives for the candy jar first thing) because my afternoon was filled with writing some of the most complicated code I’ve ever tackled. More often than not I was just guessing based on other examples and what I thought I knew or had once seen in some distant remote land long long ago and far far away. When I was wrong I felt the pieces click in place as I understood the correct way to do something and why, and when I was right, damn, I had to stop myself from dragging other people over to look at my beautiful code. I seriously considered bringing home some examples for the express purpose of posting them to my blog so that you could all ooh and aah.
Tomorrow I will not even give my old cubicle a second glance as I race by on my way to the candy jar my new seat in IS.
In other news, Operation Child Starvation has officially begun here on the home front. Also known as Operation No More Goddamned Fishsticks for Dinner, it mostly consists me making tasty dinners that my children then refuse to eat. Tonight, my four year old was the big winner after he managed to eat one whole bite. Last night I explained to them that if they didn’t eat dinner (in the vile form of soup and garlic bread) they would just have go hungry, but tonight I caved and fed them peanut butter sandwiches. I refuse to be the kind of parent who insists that they clean their plates (although I often insist that my four year old eat a certain number of bites) but I’m not sure how to get them to eat food that is actually good. I have this idea that if I just keep offering they’ll eventually eat it, but I fear I am just deluding myself.
On the bright side though, I’m eating really, really good lunches these days.