v23.6 - Changing Gears

Good morning folks,

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As the title suggests, I'm switching gears.  It's time to make some serious decisions and some major changes and I need to either do it now or never accomplish the things I want to accomplish in life.

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I realized a few things yesterday.  I arrived home from work, kissed my family and asked how their days went.  I went downstairs and checked my mail and forums like I do almost every single day.  This time, however, I decided to take a walk around the basement; my goal was to improve one aspect of our living space down there.  Then it occurred to me, what if I came home every day from work and made it a point to improve just one thing a day?  How many things could you possibly improve in a living space?  Would there be more than 365 things you could do?  Regardless, that was my decision so I decided to do something.

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I looked around for approximately 30 minutes before I finally settled on a chore; then I went to work.  In our furnace room we have a bunch of stuff that has started to pile up.  Right now we have an old entertainment stand in there with camping gear and Christmas stuff laying all over the place.  I decided to organize the chaos and was able to clean up the mess by storing the stuff away properly and making a chaotic mess of randomness into something neat and organized.  This only took me 15 minutes and the end result was a lot nicer to look at than what was there prior.  Only 15 minutes and I was able to improve my living space.

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Of course I wasn't completely happy with only putting out 15 minutes of my day to improve something since my wife put in a few hours that day doing some cleaning downstairs I felt I needed to do something else.  That is when I noticed my weight gym laying in the corner in pieces.  I bought this thing a couple years ago and there just wasn't enough room in our last place to have it setup properly and used.  I had disassembled the thing and stored it and when we moved I transferred it from one storage area to another.  Now I had the space and an area that was out of the way so the kids won't play on it.  I decided it was time to resurrect the old beast and set it back up again.  I had only put this thing together once and it was a couple years ago.  The thing has a bunch of cables and wheels and all kinds of moving pieces and I just couldn't remember what went where.  After a quick google search and typing in my model number I was able to find the assembly instructions for the thing and I began a 1.5 hour adventure to assemble the beast.  Of course once it was all assembled I just had to try it out which led to a 30 minute work out.  Though I'm a bit sore toay, I feel good so I've made a decision to make the work out part of my daily routine as well.  Time to burn away some of this fat!

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You see folks, there is something else I'm not telling you.  The other reason I took on these tasks was because I was bored.  Normally I would have been playing WoW in the evening but yesterday there was a major patch to the game resulting in the game servers being offline until almost 10pm my time.  As a result, I found other things to occupy myself; things that really mattered.  I did login to WoW last night, but only for a short time.  I logged in and immediatly didn't want to play, I can't describe why that was I just didn't feel like playing.  Maybe because I was tired or some other reason I can't explain but my overall feeling last night just wasn't about gaming.  For those who know me, you know that isn't normally me as I love to game and try to get at the computer whenever possible.

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So what do I think happened?  Well to be honest work has been a real downer lately.  I'm in a position that I feel is above me and I lack the necessary skills to perform is effectively.  While I may possess the leadership skills needed to run a team, I don't possess the techinal skills needed to operate tools like Excel and Word to provide proper reporting, pivot tables and all that stuff I've never used before.  Nobody has actually sat down and explained how all that stuff works so I've been lost in a sea of uncertainty as my boss asks me for information in a certain format and says, 'Just throw it in Excel and create a pivot for it'.  I stare at him blakely and remind him that I have no idea what he's talking about.  This team is also under a microscope right now and I need to properly (and very accurately) report on efficiency gains and project statuses.    The stress levels are high and this entire transition is depending on the efficiency gains my team can produce in order to be successful.

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Just before I left work yesterday I was given a task to complete for today.  Of course I thought I was well ahead of the game with what I had already written up and published to the intranet but my boss quickly threw it aside and wanted a spreadsheet in Excel.  He basically told me exactly what he wanted and I had no clue how I was going to get that all to work in Excel.  I've been trying to get someone to show me this stuff but everyone is too damn busy with their own things to help so I've resorted to Google and tutorials and still can't seem to make this shit work.  It's very frustrating.

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Anyway folks, I went off on a tangent there for a minute.  The point is, work is really stressing me out and it has started to affect my home life.  I can't enjoy gaming if I have to worry about work all night long.  While it's nice to say, 'Leave your work at work', the truth of the matter is you can't always do that; especially if you're trying to keep your job during this recession.  Only the strong will survive or the extreamly lucky.

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A minor correction in yesterday's musing regarding the Roll-up-the-Rim total.  You see, after I wrote my musing yesterday I went downstairs to get a coffee and low and behold they still had some roll-up cups available.  Of course I got one wiht my coffee and of course didn't win a thing.  So add $1.54 to that total from yesterday and add one more loss to my count.  Out of 70 coffees I won 8 times, pathetic isn't it?

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Take care folks and we'll see you again soon.

Cheers,
Al