Sunday, February 15, 2009

Five Years


Earlier this month, Groundhog's Day to be exact, I hit my five-year anniversary at work. The day itself went without much fanfare - to be perfectly honest I didn't even remember until I was reminded of the fact in the afternoon. The main reason for this lapse is that I'm as busy as I've ever been. Even the craziness that was the 2Q "Fast-Track" build-out in 2007 pales in comparison to this. And I'm about as happy as I've ever been, because there is nothing I like better than to have a big challenging project to deal with. It isn't without downside, but there is little I hate more than to be slow at work.

I've gotten so busy that I've had to delegate most of the site visits. I did take one trip back in January, which ended up setting personal records for length (Sunday to Friday, back just in time for the hockey game) and frigidity (the temperature didn't get above 0 from Tuesday morning on!). But being out of the office for a week straight was nearly incapacitating, even with access to email via the Crackberry and the laptop. It was after this week, staring down at the mountain of work yet to be done, that we decided that I would need to remain in the office to coordinate everything. So far I've sent five different people out to walk the sites that normally I would handle.

That is not to say I've been in the office continuously since that last trip. In fact I've been back to Minnesota twice in the last two weeks. I went up to the Twin Cities the day after my anniversary for the inaugural meeting of the Minnesota State Wireless Association with my boss. It was a pretty decent time and I did enjoy meeting a lot of the people I have worked with for years without actually ever meeting face to face - one of the downsides of an email-oriented workplace. Last week my boss and I trekked up to Brainerd early (4 AM!) on Tuesday morning to discuss design standards with our client. Unfortunately, I believe that I picked up a cold from this trip, because Thursday night I developed a sore throat and fever and I've been kind of out of the game since. I did try to make up some ground yesterday at work but I found that my productivity was pretty low.