Keeping It Together Til I Go
From audio journal episode: AJE-2002-01-05-12-39.
Okay, I think one way to minimize the pain at work is to stay very well-organized, and not allowing the office to become cluttered. We’re allocated an hour and a half a day in our schedules for administrative type duties, and so I need to utilize that time in this effort. I do that by continually repositioning and regrouping items as I discover ways to arrange them that makes them quicker to locate. Each time my job needs and assigned tasks change, minor reorganizations of my office become necessary.
I still feel angst and uneasiness about continuing to work for the company, and I’m afraid to make too many long-term financial commitments; loans that would bind me to the company for any longer than what’s in my plan. I don’t like working there anymore. So I can plan for a much smaller and thus, cheaper trailer (perhaps $35,000 to $50,000). That I could pay off in the next year or two with my salary and savings if I had to. As of today, that’s the plan. I’d sock $3500 a month into the trailer; perhaps more if I live very lean.
[BF] asked last night, “Aren’t you worried about leaving your job?”
“Well, yes,” I told her. “I’m terrified. But I think that leaving is something I must do, because working there is something I hate doing nowadays, and it’s killing me to do so.” That environment, especially since I work at home, is very difficult for me to function within anymore, and I’ve just lost the desire; especially after this last performance appraisal. You know, I worked pretty darn hard to study those new technologies and to write good computer code last fall. But I was not recognized as excelling for that. That bothers me continually.
Work performance is a very subjective thing, and I hatef living so much at the whimsical judgments of others, as I said to [BF]. These days, I’m tired of one or two other people (bosses and tech leads) holding my entire livelihood in their hands, and denying me the advancement that I full well deserve. So in light of this, my resolve to leave corporate America has grown quite strong in the past year.
It’s just a question of when to leave. Right now, the plan is to quit at the end of 2003. But in the meantime, I must figure out how to get by until then as efficiently as possible, and with as little friction with coworkers as I can manage. I’m going to make it.
I’ll continue striving for solid performance. But if any technical problems interfere with my progress, I’ll notify my manager immediately and often, like I told them of the repeated VPN connection problems lately, and how these have consumed a lot of my time to troubleshoot and work with the help desk to resolve. It appears that the company doesn’t prioritize this type of home-based access very highly these days. In fact, my outage they filed as a severity-6 problem (the lowest priority possible). I mentioned this, and I plan on making much more noise overall.
On the other hand, it’s quite true that though my complaints are one hundred percent valid, perhaps I’ve made too much noise lately. So, sometimes I think people tune me out, in spite of the accurateness of what I’m saying. If one raises too many issues, people start ignoring. This unfortunately is a phenomenon of life, and I suspect that I’ve experienced this. You really have to pick your battles, as it were.
But my writing business is going to be totally different because it can easily be done entirely through the Internet, and I’m going to do just fine. I am strongly convicted to make this happen. There’s just some things that have to happen first howver, and I’m determined to make them go. What I hope to do is get all the money I need to get that trailer on a mortgage. I think I’ll ask the bank for $90,000, and put $10,000 down and $4,000 for closing. Then, I’ll have all the money I need to complete all the tasks necessary to prepare the lot in the back for the trailer. Then, I can repay some of the loan with any left-over cash. I’ll have to figure out which mortgage (a fifteen or thirty-year) is better; the interest rates on the fifteen-year one are lower. But the monthly payment is higher. There’s also the added monthly cost of flood insurance to consider as well. I’m just gong to keep humming along with this project because in the end, it will all work out.
The trailer is the ideal situation; I could get very close to paying it off in the two years I have left to work. My only issue is: Will I be able to last two years at the company? I don’t know. It could happen that either they’ll fire me, or I’ll get so fed up with the whole affair that I’ll quit before I intend to. Time will tell. I must figure out how to last there, and maintain at least solid performance; at least for the first year of my last two left. For the second, I could slip a little. But for this year, 2002, I’ve got to remain solid, and so, any hardship I encounter, I must think about, like the hardship of working with the VAJ (IBM’s Visual Age for Java) application and its very small fonts. There doesn’t seem to be any way to make those fonts bigger, and this is a serious problem. I get headaches when I work with it, because it forces me to switch to the 1024 X 768 screen mode; the VAJ windows are too big to fit in the 800 X 600 mode that I’ve used successfully for years. This package has a lot of quirks. The log boxes (that wait for input) don’t pop up to the front of the window list when they appear. This means that the program appears to lock up frequently, and when that happens, one must remember to look for said windows before restarting it. VAJ’s got a lot of holes.
This, and numerous inhibitors complicate my home-based work life these days. My low vision is a big one as well, and I’m going to start mentioning it. Now I won’t throw my whole list of problems out there. But I will document the most pervasive and persistent ones when someone accuses me of working too slowly. So I don’t want to over-use these valid excuses for my current performance level, as I mentioned above because mentioning them too much makes people numb to them. Nonetheless, I do want to use them when necessary. These are cards in my hand that I’ve never played before. But I’ll start playing them this year, in order to get me through the next two years.
It could happen that the company lets me go, and grants me a severance or at least some unemployment compensation and perhaps some disability payments. I want to look into the disability thing and find out how it works, its requirements, how long after work stops does it take for the payments to begin, and so on. I might be able to get some sort of income from that. Again, time will tell.
I just can’t think too much about moving too far forward. I mean, I know where I’m heading, but I must focus on the small steps, like today, working on the room, getting things organized. Heck, I might even take a little nap here after while. But thinking in the small details though it bores me, is necessary. I think that today, by god, I’m going to put these phones away. They’ve been sitting here on my dresser for a while. So I’ll get one of those U-Haul cube boxes and pack ‘em up, and either take them up to storage or put them in the cellar here. Haven’t decided yet. But at the end of today, they will be put away, for sure.
So, I need to visit that mobile home place and choose a trailer, and get the process started for buying it. I’ll see if Mom can take me up there. Let me ask her now. She wasn’t feeling very well this morning. Unsettled stomach I think. Hopefully she feels good enough to go up.
Now I’ve not said too much here on getting my writing going. But a primary focus of that effort will be to explore my people-phobia and talk at length about how this fear came about. To that end, I’ve divised that exercise where I’ve listed all the women that have significantly impacted my life, and I want to explore in each of those cases the fear and anxiety that gripped me as I contemplated approaching them. All these experiences I wish to examine in depth, and I hope that in that work, I’ll gain further insight into my fears of rejection and how to rid myself of it.
Alright, so I’m going to let you go for now, and I will talk to you later.
Take care.
Tom Hesley