Update my resume

www.43things.com is a wonderful web-site for those of us that love lists. Recently I put "update my resume" on my list of things I want to do. I’m not sure exactly why I put this on my list, but I think it shows that the level of BS at work may have finally hit some subconscious threshold.

I took this job in 1990 when my oldest started preschool. Not that I was a work-at-home mom, but my job was eleven miles away from the preschool. Until then she had been at a daycare a few blocks away from my job. Eleven miles may not seem like a lot, but in Miami, especially with pre-H. Andrew traffic patterns, it could be an hour to an hour and a half to travel those eleven miles. All it would take is a car accident on the expressway and I wouldn’t be able to pick her up at the end of the day.

So I took a job close by. I don’t regret it. The stress was less, the hours more flexible and the pay about the same. I’ve very rarely been bored, and there’s always new things to learn if I do find myself bored at work (those days are gone forever!).

The last seventeen years have been educational, interesting and as I said never boring, definitely my kind of job. Unfortunately in the last two years or so, management has become somewhat erratic in their decision-making. My position is not hourly and it’s not exempt, it’s “job-basis”. Garbage pickup folks are also job-basis. It means you are given a job, and you take however long you need to do it, and then you are done. In the case of the garbage pickup, the routes are fairly well established, but in my case, the work is continually piled up whether or not it is more than a normal workload.

I’ve been a systems programmer since 1980, so I know there are times that projects require 60 or even 80 hours of work in a week, and there’s the support tasks on top of that, as well as, on-call duties. But usually those are scheduled. Now we find ourselves in a position where we have lost three people in the last two years (one was promoted, one position was never filled and subsequently taken back, and the third was fired). The workload has increased by about 300% from the time we had three people in the group. There are now two of us. Even working 16 hours a day, we couldn’t catch up because management, in all it’s wisdom, refuses to let us take outages on the servers to perform said work.

So basically as the senior person in the “group”, I document everything so I can have that piece of paper ready to hold up in the meeting (after something fails because we couldn’t do Preventive Maintenance), and attempt to use it to cover my umm… donkey. That part of my job is a waste of time, effort and tax-payers money.

Anyway, I’ve thought of moving on, but my kids are still in school. The correct thing is to survive until my youngest goes to college in about four years, and then move on. I can get a job in any municipality that participates in the Florida retirement plan and keep my longevity (at least towards retirement). Homes are much cheaper, and bigger and newer further north.

But I see myself putting “update my resume” on my list of things to do now. Along with a separate goal "get my certifications" this shows a definite shift in attitude towards finding a new job.

For now I will get my certifications, keep them current and keep my resume updated. Maybe familiarizing myself with with government shops have UNIX would be useful, too.