What do you do and where?

[Strazos]

If you do not get posted to Iraq I will be fucking amazed.

+70% pay mod, and no family or anything to worry about not being able to bring with me. Give me a nice laptop and I'll deal with it for a tour. At least I'd get it out of the way early, and I can't imagine they'd want to ship me to two shitholes back-to-back early in my career as a junior officer.

[Cheddar]

If you do not get posted to Iraq I will be fucking amazed.

+70% pay mod, and no family or anything to worry about not being able to bring with me. Give me a nice laptop and I'll deal with it for a tour. At least I'd get it out of the way early, and I can't imagine they'd want to ship me to two shitholes back-to-back early in my career as a junior officer.

Youth is so optomistic!

[schild]

I can't imagine they'd want to ship me to two shitholes back-to-back early in my career as a junior officer.

I can't imagine they wouldn't considering your title would be Private Expendable of the Bitch's Consulate.

[Johny Cee]

Well, I'm on course to break 70 chargeable hours this week. 

Fuck tax season.

[Yegolev]

Coincidentally I got an email from TurboTax saying I need to wrap it up before March 27 when the price goes up.  Will I pay extra just to pretend I'm sticking it to The Man by waiting until the last minute to postmark my return?  Stay tuned.

[Endie]

If you do not get posted to Iraq I will be fucking amazed.

+70% pay mod, and no family or anything to worry about not being able to bring with me. Give me a nice laptop and I'll deal with it for a tour. At least I'd get it out of the way early, and I can't imagine they'd want to ship me to two shitholes back-to-back early in my career as a junior officer.

I dunno if it is still the case, but Vile Rat (not entirely by coincidence, our chief diplomat for a long time in Goonfleet) was working in the Foreign Service in Iraq a couple of years back, and they let him pretty much choose his next assignment.  Aside from the odd trip to meet fellow Goons elsewhere, he spent the bulk of his time in the Green Zone with a laptop as you describe.  That was when things in Iraq were at their worst, so maybe the perk of choosing where to go next doesn't happen, now.

[Strazos]

Well, they say you can choose from a bunch of choices, but "The needs of the Department take priority."

And from what I hear, if you're coming off a hardship post (re: living conditions are below those of living in decent parts of DC to some degree), or a danger post (or both  ), you're much more likely to get posted to wherever you request.

Out of curiosity, do you know which career track VR was on?

[schild]

Well, I'm on course to break 70 chargeable hours this week. 

Fuck tax season.

Well, I'll take the cash from the extra 30. Quit whining.

[Signe]

Oh Oh!  Can I keep him?

[Tale]

Anything I said about working in online news for a TV network until last December was from the private sector. I've now been in a slightly different government sector job for about five months.

It's been an education in accepting inefficiency. All around me, people are working on wonderful things that would get cancelled if they were profit-driven. My private sector reflexes say "these poor people, they're doomed", then I realise they've been here for 10 years and are probably headed for another 10. Presuming the government won't be seen adding to the unemployment queue during a recession.

The pay is better. The downside is, I have more work than I can do. All visible to the public and driven to absolute broadcast deadlines. I get up at 5am and work from home, go to the office and work all day, then work from home till midnight. It spills over into most weekends. I'm tired. I need a sidekick. But I'm happier and feel safer.

[jpark]

My dream has just come true - I have just signed on as a professor at a major university.  I teach and research about new medicines/ biotechnology.

My official start date is not until July - but the deal is now signed :)

[Signe]

Wow.  Congrats, Doc!

[Nebu]

My dream has just come true - I have just signed on as a professor at a major university.  I teach and research about new medicines/ biotechnology.

My official start date is not until July - but the deal is now signed :)

Congrats.  I hope that you enjoy it more than I did. 

[lamaros]

My dream has just come true - I have just signed on as a professor at a major university.  I teach and research about new medicines/ biotechnology.

My official start date is not until July - but the deal is now signed :)

Congrats!

[apocrypha]

Nice one prof! Congratulations :)

[Triforcer]

Congratulations Dr. jpark!!  :)

[K9]

Congratulations!

[Abagadro]

My dream has just come true - I have just signed on as a professor at a major university.  I teach and research about new medicines/ biotechnology.

My official start date is not until July - but the deal is now signed :)

Congrats!

I'm thinking about applying for this job.

[Nebu]

I'm thinking about applying for this job.

Fiji?  Damn, that would be lovely. 

[Signe]

Good luck!  That looks like fun.  Bring us back some water!

[Bunk]

Holy crap, you'd be making $5 million Vatu per year. Um, well, that's a lot of Vatu, I guess.

[Nebu]

I've always wanted to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of bills. 

[Signe]

I seem to know a lot of Bills.  I think I'd need a couple of wheelbarrows.

[Sky]

Two wheelbarrows for Terrell.

[Merusk]

Fuck! They got me! I'm hit, Hobbie, I'm goin' down!

Yeah, 20% reduction in force.  Glad the company thought they were strong enough to move into Indianapolis last month.    I'm not the fucked one though, as they cut 4 people in the department and all 4 of us were the only ones who knew how to do what we were doing.  Piling our work load on top of those still there is going to cause some break downs.

[Nebu]

Gah.  Sorry to hear it Merusk.  I hope a better opportunity finds you. 

[Signe]

Aww.  I'm sorry, Merusk. 

[Bunk]

Sorry to hear that Merusk, always sucks.

On the other side of that, the person sitting 10 feet from me right now has no idea that she is going to be called in to HR in half an hour and fired. I understand why they are terminating her, but its tough as I like her as a person. Makes for a hard couple days as a supervisor knowing this and having to go on pretending everything is normal around her.

[Merusk]

Thanks all.  Apparently the department head told my supervisor in their later meeting, "He was the most professional of them all.  Offering what he saw as areas of concern and updating us on the status of what he was working on."  Well, duh, I thought.  I wasn't just going to pack up, not say goodbye and let everyone else figure out where I was on some complex projects.  The production manager did just that, so good luck to the woman who inherited his mess.  At least none of us deleted important files like happened last time. (They *still* haven't learned to lock people out of systems as the terminations are happening. I could have done some serious harm if I was the type.)

Sucks to hear, Bunk.  I always get pissed when I'm fired in the afternoons. (I've been working since I was 15 years old, so nearly 20 years. Yeah I've been through this before.)  It always feels like "hey we wanted to wring one extra day out of you.  Now go do nothing productive all evening, since you can't send out resumes or hit the unemployment line today. Ha ha!" 

[MrHat]

So, any plans on the horizon then Merusk? You don't seem very down about it, I'm getting a definite "blessing in disguise" vibe from your posts.

[Viin]

Sucks to get laid off. What were you doing exactly? And do you still want to do it or are you thinking of doing something else now?

[Engels]

Sorry to hear Merusk. hat's off to you for putting on a good face to it.

[Merusk]

Well, you can't really do anything BUT put a good face on it.  I'm pissed that the company's making what I feel to be a series of terminally stupid mistakes. But hey, maybe I'm the misinformed know-nothing and they'll be able to do twice the work with half the staff as they move into this new market.  Maybe the new market won't blow-up in their face like the expansion they did last year and is now bleeding money.  Maybe pigs will fly and bacon will grow on trees.    If you read the thread I posted in Politics, it's pretty easy why I see this as a blessing in disguise.  Plus, I know it's not personal, just a bad business decision. I'd rather be cut as a result of that (Or even a lot of bad luck from good business decisions) than tossed for being 'unproductive' or a nuisance.  I also saw it coming as I was making more than my direct supervisor by at least 5 grand.

Sucks to get laid off. What were you doing exactly? And do you still want to do it or are you thinking of doing something else now?

I was supposed to be drawing up standard details and house plans for the production side of the office to use when pushing out 'lot specifics.' (Homes have to be drawn and permitted on a lot-by-lot basis, and per customer selections.)   However, since we were down-staffed I was doing 1/2 of one divisions production work with intermediate day to day and a half breaks to fix any problems in the drawings.  This was putting us (me and my supervisor) with a back log of about 5 months work as it was.   Now she's doing all the work for that division and NOBODY is fixing the standards.   An analogy to coding would be if you had a template that was broken and every person who used that template had to make 9-10 corrections every time they used it instead of fixing the template.  You're losing tons of time to work that could be fixed at the root level, because you feel you can't give up the time to fix it permanently.

That's the production side of the housing industry, and while I enjoy housing I knew it was a dead-end for me for a long time.  I might go back to it later, if a management position was open, but I won't do the grunt work again as it's career suicide for a guy with a Bachelor of Architecture.  I've been buckling down to progress my internship over the last two months, and I need hours in an actual Arch or A&E firm to complete it, so that's the other reason it's a minor blessing.  I knew I was going to leave within the year, anyway, and just needed to find a firm that was actually hiring interns right now.  They're few and far between as any construction industry job is right now.  It just sucks to not have the safety net of a weekly paycheck.

I could go on, but I'm sure it doesn't interst most of you.  thanks for the well-wishes!

[Engels]

Doesn't surprise me, really. This morning on our local public radio they were going to dedicate an entire hourto debate wether computerizing medical records would 'save money', with various medical professionals on the panel. One of the guests, a hospital administrator of some sort, was against 'this sort of thing' because it wouldn't save money, and would be expensive to do. So, as with your template analogy, we discover that there are serious morons in management. I know, News at 11 and all that.

[Murgos]

Sorry to hear about the hard times.

I dodged a bullet yesterday.  I got a call from my manager that started, "The first exempt list came out and you weren't on it.  Then the second list came out and you weren't on it again.  But I pushed back and got you onto the new one."

Which was nice of him.