Right now, the answer is about six months.

But, they don’t take cats, also the whole student loans thing.

Oh, well.

Pointing at her computer monitor, she asked me “Can you read German?”

I looked at the screen, and it was plainly in German, but beyond that basic conclusion it was pretty incomprehensible.

So I said, “I’m sorry, high school German was a long time ago.”

and this didn’t seem enough, for some reason, so after a pause I added “in high school”.

this I thought was a little bit ridiculous, so after another pause I added “which was a good time to take high school classes I suppose.”

I don’t think I helped my case at any point.

That didn’t pan out, and  now I’m doing technical support for a living again.

That’s not really a complaint, mind you.  It doesn’t pay terribly well compared to some other gigs I’ve had, but it’s a job that lasts from 8-5, 5 days a week, I’m not stressing out about hitting a release date, nobody’s expecting me to put in any unpaid OT or work the weekend and honestly it’s usually pretty fun.  I genuinely enjoy it most days and that’s a crazy thing to say about a job.

The other big thing about being out of school for five months, of course, is that my student loans are going to start coming due in a month.  Fortunately for me – less fortunately for my lenders – I was taking all my paychecks from my student job and sticking them in a checking account and generally not touching it in anticipation of this.

So I have one of my loans completely paid off – the one that didn’t get consolidated and that was still being held by one of the sleazier student loan companies – and as of tomorrow I’ll have all the interest paid on the remaining loans and I can get started chipping away at the principal.

Mind you, that’s still 35 grand worth of student loans to pay, but I did some napkin math and figure I’ve saved myself something like 12 grand over the course of a ten year student loan, but I won’t have a ten year student loan because I’ve also cut about four years total off the time it’s going to take to pay the thing off.

I am inordinately proud of this, even though it DID completely wipe out that account I’d been carefully sticking my paychecks in to AND wiped out the first three  paychecks from my new job.  I’m still looking at years of debt, but I feel like I’m actually tackling it head on.

This was not something I was looking forward to – the job market is touchy these days in the best of markets, and I’m not in the best of markets – so it was with a great deal of relief that I found myself, on the 6th, at a new employer, happily sizing up a new cubicle, signing up for benefits and a membership at the corporate gym – and I WILL be making use of it, if for no other reason than that traffic is murder around the place at 5 and spending half an hour on an exercise bike is a welcome delay tactic – and generally settling in.

I shouldn’t actually say “new employer”, because I’m actually returning to a company I worked for in the mid 90s, but it’s been long enough that just about everyone I know has moved on.  A mostly new employer, anyway.

So, come September when my student loans start coming due, I should actually be able to make payments on them.  What recent graduate could ask for more?

See, I have a Mac and a PC on my desk, and I mostly use the Mac for things, if only because it has a much better monitor than the PC and I’m more comfortable, these days, with OSX.

Thing is, the IT guy in question really doesn’t like Macs, and though he can’t do anything about the fact that we have a lot in the building, he can make them inconvenient to use.

Case in point: our internal firewall blocks port 3389 for most machines. This is the port that Remote Desktop uses. It’s unblocked for my PC so I can do remote support from the PC, but the guy won’t unblock it for the Mac.

I asked him about this a couple of times early in my employment, and his reaction was, well, derisive at best.

I toyed with the idea of spoofing the PC’s MAC address on the Mac, but I rejected that as a little too directly confrontational.

On the other hand, I realized yesterday that port 22 is NOT blocked from the Mac, and from there it took me about 10 minutes to get Cygwin installed and an ssh proxy running on the PC, and a few more minutes to figure out how to make all requests to 3389 go out through the proxy (Since Remote Desktop Connection on the Mac doesn’t use the SOCKS proxy setting) and now I have remote desktop connectivity from the Mac and, well, life is good.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from one of the school’s departments asking if I wouldn’t mind coming in for an interview please.

The interview was basically “uh, we don’t get many people with twenty years of experience asking for jobs as a technician, are you sure?”

It’s been pretty fun, really, most every day brings something new and delightful, partially because our default computer OS install is 64-bit Windows 7 and I’m finding that some software companies still haven’t gotten past the idea of coding for Windows XP and partially because I’m working with a building that’s about half full of gigantic egos.  I mean tenured professors.  No, I meant the first thing.

Anyway.  Today’s “new and delightful” was getting to overhear a professor asking to book one of our larger labs for, as he put it, a “make-up session”, because his entire class was going to be absent on Monday and he wanted to have them make up that day.

They’re going to be absent Monday because it’s MLK jr. day.

I think the guy doesn’t really know what “federal holiday” means.

My corporate overlords actually handed out bonuses, just to make the point about being in good financial shape, and I made out surprisingly well.

See, every time we ship a project, we send the customer a satisfaction survey sort of thing with a dozen or so questions; they’re asked to rank us on a scale of 1 to 5.

At the meeting, for every project that came back straight 5′s, they gave $50 checks to the developer, PM, and QA guy that worked on it.

We have six developers and two QA guys.

Most of the developers wound up with 1 check, a couple got 2, and, well, I wound up with 4 and the other QA guy did pretty well too. 

So, not fired AND a nice bonus to offset the fact that I got a little silly at Newegg last weekend after my hard drive died.

Also, about the milestones thing:  This is the 400th post here.  It’s not a significant number in any way and the 2 year anniversary of this blog isn’t coming up for a couple of weeks, but it’s a big, round number, so it’s kind of a milestone.  I choose to think of it that way, anyway.

I’m a believer, personally, in staying the hell home when I’m sick instead of going in to work.

I meet a lot of other people who feel the same way, and I see lots of articles saying that bosses would rather you stay home.

In practice, however, I have only ever been told to go home when I’m sick once, and it turned out I had pneumonia.  Usually, when I HAVE gone in to work when I was visibly sick, I’ve been praised for it, and when I’ve taken more than, say, a single day off sick, I tend to catch flack for it.

So reality differs from ideal. Big surprise, right?

Anyway, I was tremendously sick for over a week recently.  I even missed a day of school, and it marked the first time in three years that I have missed a class for any reason.  I was honestly, earnestly, sick, worse off than I have been in a very long time, to the point where I couldn’t stand or sit upright for more than a few minutes without wanting to throw up.

On the other hand, I had a project due last Friday, and guess what, was the only guy available to finish it up.

So, I took Monday off, went in to work and coughed my way through Tuesday and Wednesday, couldn’t make it in on Thursday, and then made it in on Friday to finish the project, after which I missed the aforementioned class on Saturday.

I got considerable praise for coming in and getting the project out, by the way.

Then, on Monday, two people I work reasonably closely with – one of our vice presidents and our chief architect – were out.

I’m reasonably sure that I am responsible for the godawful weekend both had and their subsequent absences.

They’re both really NICE people, so I feel bad for this on a personal level.

On a smug bastard level, I’m calculating the difference between their salary and mine and how many important decisions they make on a daily basis and – any way I look at it – the three days of working-while-sick the company got out of me last week were pretty much dwarfed by the overall productivity hit of these two power players being down.

There’s a point in there somewhere but I’m not coming to it cleanly, so I’ll leave it unsettled and move on.

We have – and this is back to work, but not at all related to my status as a Typhoid Mary – we have an all-company lunch on Friday.

Friday is a payday, mind you, and the week before last was marked by a full week of executive meetings behind closed doors with our corporate consultant.

I’m not saying that anything’s going to happen at this lunch.  It might be a jovial all-hands-let’s-talk-about-corporate direction meeting.  It’s not that I’m writing down a list of the top five people most likely to be let go and putting it in an envelope that I will bring to the meeting or anything.  Cause that would be, you know, pessimistic. 

(And, yes, I’m on the list; my boss knows that I’m leaving in June so if they are looking at doing staff reductions they’d be idiots to keep me.)

Update: I took out a product manager as well, so I’m up to three.

That is to say, he’s a decent enough guy and we get along well, but he really doesn’t understand what QA’s role is.  He thinks that it’s to test the code as he’s written it, while my outlook is more that I should be testing the code to see whether he’s written it according to the spec.

This means that I tend to file lots of bugs like “per spec section 2.2.8.1, x is incorrect behavior, it should be doing y.”

In return, he’s done things like send bugs back to me marked “won’t fix”, with the Reason field filled out with “pffft.”

Anyway.  We do get along better than this would suggest, because my point of view is that, eventually, the customer will either notice that the product doesn’t work the way they wanted it to, in which case I’ll be able to pull out the bug report and point out that I filed a bug on the issue, or the customer won’t notice, in which case no harm done.

The important thing is that there IS a bug report.

But I have embarked on a program to break him, anyway.

We have heavily-subsidized snacks at work.  Candy bars are a quarter, for instance, and we get free soda.  These are pretty nice perks.

The problem is that, when snacks are so cheap, it takes a little more willpower not to indulge.

Case in point, this particular developer and Peanut M&Ms.

Three or four months ago, I was in his cubicle talking about something, and he picks up the bag of Peanut M&Ms on his desk, shows it to me, and says:

“You see this?  This is my last bag of Peanut M&Ms.  No more.  I am off Peanut M&Ms as of now.”

So of course, for the next month or so, I would drop off another bag of Peanut M&Ms on his desk when he walked away, and he would come back, and he would swear, and then I would hear the bag being ripped open.

Our snack cabinet ran out of Peanut M&Ms eventually, and when it got restocked, they did not restock the Peanut M&Ms.  I believe this to have been at his request.

This evening, at the store, I saw that they had Christmas-themed 2-pound bags of M&M products marked down to a buck-eighty.

Someone’s getting a little present Monday morning.

I’m a bad man.

From: (our human resources director)
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 3:01 PM
To: (lovable old me)
Subject: 401k

You are now eligible to join the company’s 401k plan.  Let me know if you would like additional information on the program.

(our human resources director)
voice:  503.xxx.xxxx
fax:      503.xxx.xxxx

Let’s see, HOW much has the market gone down in the last few days?  I think I’ll just keep my money under my mattress, thanks.