Tag Archives: change

Getting short…

Posted on by

There’s something very freeing about working on short time. As I’m reeding the calendar these days, I’ve got a grand total of 5 days when I’m actually going to be in the office out of the 14 that I’ll officially be carried on the roles of the Engineer Regiment. In school it was called senioritis. Here, it’s called short-timer’s syndrome and impacts everyone who is near retirement or who is on the way, but hasn’t completed out-processing. Symptoms are a generalized loosening of the tongue and a Give-a-Shit indicator that’s plummeting towards zero. It’s a few days in the middle of a career when the job you’re leaving doesn’t matter all that much because all you’re really worried about dealing with is the personal minutia that will get you out of town and the pressure of making a good first impression at the new job hasn’t spooled up yet. It’s like the peaceful calm at the eye of a hurricane… and I’d never realized it before, but it’s a hellofa fun place to be.

I’m going to enjoy my short timer status for the next few days, wrap up a few loose ends, and say my professional smell ya laters on my own timeline. If I happen to get any work of major import done between now and next Friday, you can be pretty sure that it’s purely a fortunate accident because I’m pretty much focused like a laser on the making as expeditious an exit as possible. For now, everything else is background noise.

Just like that…

Posted on by

I’ve had nine months to think about what this post would look like, but surprisingly it’s not one that I started working on in advance. Now that the day of jubilee has arrived, I find myself at something of a loss for words. How do I sum up the experience that has been finding my eject handle? Is it defined by the statistics? 273 days on the hunt. 91 days of frozen time. 385 resumes submitted. Sometimes I felt like I could count off the hours of each one of those days. Almost a year of complete confidence tempered by false starts and rejections. And then moments of unadulterated joy. Whatever the moment is, it’s not defined by the statistics.

I’m feeling very conscious of those who made the jump before I have. Of how much I miss them and how much I’ll miss a few of those I’ll leave behind. I’m conscious now more than ever of home, of family, and of friends from whom I’ve been too long separated. They say you can’t go home again. I’ve been away long enough to know that everything has changed – and that nothing that matters has really changed. I’m coming home and I’ll take it as I find it, changes and all.

There is plenty of time to go into specifics later. For now, let it suffice to know that tonight I will sleep the sleep of the vindicated. My great experiment in Memphis is drawing to an end. I’ve survived my ride on the crazy train. And I’m coming home.

When I sat down to write, I thought this post would be a valedictory. It seems my nerves are still too raw for that kind of triumphalism. Give me a day or two for the reality to sink in, though, and it’s a fair bet that you’ll be reading posts with some serious swagger.

That’s progress…

Posted on by

I had a vague hope for most of the day that the powers that be would intercede and pass the word before close of business. It would have been nice to spend the weekend in something other than a state of definite maybe. That might over-state the situation a bit, but the clock is running and almost everything involved in this process is time sensitive. The longer it takes to square things away here, the more of a headache it’s going to be to start getting things lined up on the other end. Until they officially put a mark on the wall, I’ll remain stuck somewhere between reality and happy illusion – and there’ll be a hard limit on how far I can and can’t prepare. Can I pack every stick of stuff in the house? Sure. But I don’t know if that means I’m going to spend the next two days or two months surrounded by boxes and making dinner every night in the one saucepan that I didn’t pack. I can’t make any definitive plans to get a house full of boxes from here to there. Maybe more difficult is that I can’t start making any decisions about where I’ll be unpacking all those boxes once they get to wherever they’re going. I’m getting visions of way too many nights hanging out in a not quite mid-grade extended stay hotel. It won’t take me long to close out on this end. That’s the beauty of planning your exit for the better part of the year. The issues that are bedeviling me tonight are all about what happens after the Mayflower truck pulls away from Memphis. I know I can torch that bridge when I get to it, but for someone who lives his life by a plan, it’s the kind of uncertainty that can keep a guy up at night. If there’s any up side, it’s that I seem to have gone from being paranoid about the job itself to only being paranoid about what it’s going to take to get from here to there. That’s progress.

A sign of life…

Posted on by

After another week of ponderous waiting, I was given another gentle reminder that this thing up north might actually work out. I got to spend a few minutes talking to a to individual who will act as my “sponsor” during the transition and in-processing period. It wasn’t exactly the call from HR that I have been waiting for, but it’s a sign of life. At this point on the long, torturous process I seem to be overly given to looking for signs and reading tea leaves. Absent the magic moment when they throw the switch from tentative to official, that is probably as good as it’s going to get. After nine months, you’d think that I would be use to waiting for things to happen.

The ability of the system to make the simple things hard is never far from my thoughts these days. Since this whole exercise involves filling out some paperwork and moving my electrons from one database to another, it’s still hard to understand how it could possibly take as long as it does. The irony is that once they pull the trigger, they’ll probably want to give me a short reporting date and wonder why I can’t get out of here with a whole two weeks notice. I’ve been around this Army long enough to know better than spend a dime making preparations without a set of orders in hand. So, I hurry up and wait.

The new normal…

Posted on by

Today was the first day back at the office after a long break. Nothing abnormal about that. Happens the first week of every year. What caught me unprepared was how that little part of the world changed while I was paying attention to other things.

The last of my old school mentors retired. My right arm has moved on to learn how to tend a flock. Another is taking the long way around to chase a dream in Colorado. Add that to the ones who have made their escape already and I look around and barely recognize the place. These were the people who made a bad situation tolerable… And sometimes even fun. Lord knows I can’t begrudge them their good fortune, but Millington is going to be a much less interesting place in 2011.

I guess that’s the new normal. Damned nostalgia.

Off the road…

Posted on by

There are any number of great and good aspects of traveling, not the least of witch is ending up back at the place where all your stuff stays (and where you have sole dominion over the air conditioning and your schedule). Going home is always bittersweet and leaving tends to bring out more melancholy in me that usual. I’ve lived somewhere other than “home” for the better part of the last decade and despite that, I still think of it as exactly that; home. In a different time and place, maybe I’d go back, but every trip reminds me just how much I have changed (no matter all my protestations to the contrary) and how much the mountains haven’t. I may be from them, but I’m not of them any more. At the first opportunity, I went downstate and stayed… and then logged a couple of hundred thousand miles after that. When I left I swore I’d never be nostalgic for the deep quiet of the woods or the long whistle of a coal train rolling through a mining town. On a purely objective level, there’s no reason to think of home as a place I’ll ever live again. On an emotional level, though, well, that’s another thing altogether.

I’m not quite foolish enough to believe that I can go home again. I’ve priced myself out of that market and since a guy’s got to work it’s nothing more than a happy thought. Even if it were possible, I can think of dozens of reasons it wouldn’t be a good idea. Maybe someday when I invent the equivalent of sliced bread or get around to writing my great misanthropic diatribe. When that happens, of course, home would be fighting a strong desire to go somewhere with palm trees and a rum economy. Until then, I suppose it’s enough that I have promises to keep… and miles to go before I sleep.

Shift…

Posted on by

Over the last few days I posted a few test runs over on Blogger to see how I’d like it. I have to say I’ve been impressed by the way it handles. Very basic profile, very simple editing, just the thing I was looking for. To be honest, now that I find myself spending a little more time on Facebook (I can check it at work and Blackberry supports a pretty sweet Facebook app) Blogger just seems to do a little better job at filling the writing niche I’m looking for.

This isn’t “smell ya later forever” or anything, I hope you’ll check in at my new place from time to time. Don’t worry, when there’s a world class rant, I’ll let everyone know. No membership required or anything, so just point your browser of choice at: http://jdtharp.blogspot.com/ and you’ll have it. And no, before anyone asks, I’m not leaving MySpace or any damned thing like that. I’ll still be checking in and maybe even posting something over here from time to time. So, yeah, I’ll be around.

Not quite right…

Posted on by

For the last week or so, I’ve had this feeling that something is not quite right and this afternoon I think I finally figured out what it was. Over the last year or so, my average daily email intake was probably upwards of 100 a day… Now that I’ve moved over to a job that deals mainly with issues inside the organization, I’m down to maybe a dozen (that aren’t just cc’d to me for some reason). Today, I had two… that’s right, two emails. I think the strange feeling I’ve been having is my mind trying to figure out what to do with three hours of extra time during the day that use to be occupied by answering email. For some reason I’m sure something will crop up to fill the void.

Finally…

Posted on by

My four-month odyssey to move from one end of the building to another seems to be complete this week. I say seems, of course, because every advance on this front has been beaten back up till this point. Now, finally, with all my workly possessions moved into my new digs, taking marching orders from my new boss, and only occasional questions from the old, I dare to hope this could be the real deal. I forgot what it was like not to be continually surrounded by procedural dysfunction. I haven’t wanted to beat anyone to death with their own arms for at least three days… and that might just be a personal best.

Just when I thought I was out…

Posted on by

So, it’s been no secret that I’ve been trying to get set up in my new job for the better part of the last three months. Management, circumstances, and just pure dumb luck have all conspired against me at various points and now, in a personal affront, nature (that bitch) has decided to throw her hat in the ring… Every tried to leave a job in emergency management during a natural disaster? Yeah… good luck with that.

Anyone out there need an exceptionally well-qualified logistician or need a campaign plan written for taking out those damned pesky neighbors? I’m totally on the market.