Hey everyone. I really did quit my job. My last day included a well-attended lunch at a Chinese buffet, which was nice except for it didn’t summarize in a tidy hour everything bitter and sweet about leaving a job of eight years. I thought of it kind of as a birthday party for a while - everyone is paying attention to you, and you’re sort of a celebrity, but it represents the end of something, too. In that way, it’s like a graduation party, except you’re the only one graduating, and you have to be very diplomatic about the very act of graduating - almost apologetic, because it’s impolite to be as happy as I was about leaving. In the end, it was kind of like attending my own funeral, except nobody spoke.

My new job is great. They weren’t exactly ready for me on that first Monday, so they told me to show up on Wednesday and get paid for the whole week anyway. I really am not expecting to get paid for bench time ever again, but it was a great way to transition to our new life.

This first assignment is a six-week thing, which is kind of a bummer, because these new guys are way cool and there’s a lot to work on. I could easily see spending six months there, but if you start thinking like that, then you’re talking six years and dealing with the recruiters to place you somewhere else, starting every interview with “I’ve been at my current job as long as I can remember, and…”

I actually wouldn’t at all mind 6 week assignments, but the end of this one is going to mean interviewing for another one, because I’m not a known commodity. (In a year or two, this cool place can call back and say “is Dan available?” and I’ll head right over.)

Anyway, that’s work. I’ll let you know when it’s over. You and I can have lunch.

Two or three stories related to having two days off: I listened to a ton of Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” Official Mixtape, and for whatever reason, really dug it. If that makes me less “hard” in your eyes, the leak of the new Queens of the Stone Age is also crazy. That band inspires me.

There’s even new They Might Be Giants out, if you’re on iTunes, because it came out there six weeks before it’ll be in stores. They call that release schedule “experimental” but I think it’s just ridiculous. The CD will come with bonus material, which I suppose at one point was delivered as “B-sides” but is referred to in official emails as “favorites from the podcast”. Their podcast is excellent, by the way - I pretty much never listen to podcasts and they deliver the goods. The record is being described by enthusiastic iTunes reviewers as their best work in 15 years and a return to form in the full-band era. I did not come to that conclusion after three listens, but I didn’t really come to any conclusion.

But back to my two days off. I decided, since
a) I wasn’t going to really see anyone for two days, and
b) since I’d gone through four Rockstars a little faster than I’d wanted to, and
c) because my silly, nothing-to-worry-about, caffeine-makes-it-worse irregular heartbeat had my attention, and
d) I was going through a big-deal life-change anyway,

HEY! why not give up caffeine. I mentioned something about caffeine withdrawal around my grandma a year ago, complaining that it’s an unpleasant two weeks, but sometimes you have to do it, and she replied that it couldn’t be worse than two or three days, if that. It was two or three days, if that. The great thing is that I’m not fumbling around blind for Diet Coke (of all things) before I’ve taken a shower or put on a shirt. I never derived much pleasure from that ritual, I just knew I had to do it or I’d take something’s fucking head off. The flip-side of being out of the cycle at the moment is that I could snap at any time. So far, I haven’t.

Next post: games, maybe.

My first day was anti-climactic. On Friday, the people at my first assignment told me that they couldn’t possibly start me until Wednesday, so I better stay home. I read up on ASP.NET (I’m definitely into over-preparing now), went to the gym, made dinner, and moved some furniture. (Moving furniture is the surest sign of cabin fever, so the gym visit was really just therapeutic.)

Oh, and Twitter readers already know that I gave up caffeine for today. It’s probably been a year since I skipped a day, but after a Rockstar on Thursday, a Rockstar on Friday, a Rockstar on Saturday (to take care of my hangover, naturally), and Caribou yesterday, I am seeing those diminishing returns that stimulant addicts talk about. If I can stay clean until my job starts Wednesday, coffee / Rockstar might just be a weekend treat. (Or, if I resort to a daily Diet Coke, I’ll be no worse off than my wife, who doesn’t have any caffeine-related health concerns.)

Anyway, there’s a note to let you know what happened today.

Hi everyone. I’ve got a perfectly good explanation for the past month. I really do.

I got fed up at my job and started looking at alternatives. It was the kind of “fed up” where you say to yourself “I really don’t have time for Warcraft, blogging, poker, or goofing off until I get to the bottom of this.” And so I did. I brushed up on my C#/.NET development skills and hit a couple interviews. I’m leaving my job at the end of this week.

The space you’re looking at now will soon overflow with tales of my new adventures, but for now it’s enough to understand that I’m going into consulting. Lots of new jobs over the next few years, fixing what’s broken, building what needs to be built, and moving on. It’s going to be a wonderful change for me and my family. With Christie staying home with the kids for a while, I’m free to make some changes.

We’ve also been going to the YMCA three times a week. It was the end of the Summer Fitness Challenge this week, and I’m happy to report that we did it. Flip-flops (and bonus t-shirts) are ours come Monday.

For a lot of my career, I was only really given the “what” of my work. This needs doing, someone has to do it, and that person could be you.

The “when” of work can be really contentious. I had a music professor who said that amazing things happen around deadlines. I wish it weren’t so, but this is true. A lot of my projects that never got finished (or never got finished getting started) simply didn’t have deadlines, so I continue to this day to delay them. (On the other hand, I trust in my ability to work without deadlines, even with evidence to the contrary piling up.)

A better motivator for me is “why”. Help me understand why this action is necessary. Knowing your place in a larger process is hugely motivating: you’re not just working to get the job done, you’re supporting a system of people and plans that (maybe indirectly, but maybe directly) rely on you.

GTD tries to wean you off of “when”. You do it when you can, when you have energy, when you’re where you need to be, and whenever you get a chance. But one thing GTD reinforces is “who”: mostly, it’s you, but if you’re not the best person to handle it, you have to delegate. (Sometimes “who” comes down to “not me”: just saying “no” is kind of delegating, and it’s super important.)

Working from home on two days a week has brought a sharp focus on the “where” of work. I feel very limited by the things I can’t do on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, but I suppose we all have to deal with people who don’t share our schedules or our office spaces. The “where” of work changes more than all these others every day.

The reason I’m writing all this, though, is the “how” of work. I have new responsibilities, and I am feeling terribly under-supported. I have questions that only experts in my field could probably answer, and my team doesn’t reach out to help me. I am trying to get up to speed with books, forums, and training, but I still am not sure how to do a lot of the things that I know the “what”, “where”, and “why” of.

Beyond that, there are things that I really do know how to do, and work comes to me with a “when” and “how” attached. There is no quicker way to make a smart person feel micromanaged than to tell them exactly how to get their work done. I wish I could find a balance across my domains right now: some days I am completely lost on the road, and other days I’m insulted by the map I’m handed.

I have never been comfortable with the name they give reports in my office which pertain to expected sales vs. actual sales.  The term they want me to use is "penetration report".  I don’t know why it couldn’t just be called the "sales report" or the "anticipated conversion report" or whatever else.

But now I’m doing one for the reverse mortgage business, and the logical name would be "Reverse Penetration".  And I don’t think I could present that report with a straight face.

On Saturday, I ran into a guy who used to be my boss.  He brought some friends of his to a poker game, and I was explaining to them that I used to report to him.

"Used to?  Until?"

"Until things changed.  Things change."

In truth, he went back to his old division as a project manager, since he never really got a shot in the IT department.  Things just didn’t work out.

My ex-boss interrupted, though: "the best was, five or six years ago, Amy and Ken came over to tell me ‘Dan’s updating his website from work!’"

I was instantly a little embarrassed.  I’d shared my site with a few people at work, but I didn’t expect people to be keeping tabs on when I’d updated it.  I stammered "uh, so, what’d you tell them?"

He laughed.  "I asked them how they knew!" 

Ah, comeuppance!  An ironic twist!  Still, a little embarrassing.

There’s a guy at work who likes to say "I’d buy that for a dollar!" and then identifies it as being from Running Man.  It’s not.  It’s from RoboCop.  Running Man has the same kind of media criticism in it, but it’s more an indictment of society’s thirst for justice and violence than an attack on shallow journalism, entertainment, and commercialism.

So anyway, the first time he tried to pass it off as Running Man, I said "hey.  That’s RoboCop.  Trust me."  That was a few months ago, but yesterday it happened in front of Lloyd, who said "yeah, man… that’s Dan’s favorite movie, RoboCop."  The guy said "RoboCop is your favorite movie?  How messed up were you at 14?"

Which about sums it up.

We got a demo of Sourceforge Enterprise from VA Software.  The VA sales guys showed up and started the demo on a freaking-wow 17" Powerbook.  It’s great the things you can have when your job is to impress other people with your success and wealth.  (I brought my plastic clipboard, with a sticker–"FEAR ME FOR I HAVE THE POWER TO DESTROY YOU"–stuck to the back.  Tony gave me that sticker.  It pleases me.)

The great thing was that our LCD projector, which the guy hooked the super-laptop to, maxes out at 800×600, unless you know the secret combo.  Since none of us did, the presentation got scrolled a lot.  (He would have had a better time just pointing the giant 17" screen at us.)

By the way: Sourceforge Enterprise looks cool, and is way ahead of what Sourceforge.net does.  I’d be happy if we picked it up (even though I’d be the administrator of it).