I has a job an a computr

This month, I’ve been worried about my job at the Empire.   Three weeks ago, my manager finally gave me a drop-dead date of March 31st, by which I had to find another position in the company or else.  While the internal job market isn’t as grim as it was last summer when I first learned my team was dissolving, it’s still not rosy.  However, I had one bright spot:  my grand-boss was very much in my corner, and told me repeatedly that he would find somewhere for me to go before April first, that I was much too good an employee to walk out the door.  He had to repeat this to me several times this month because, being the fretful person I am, I have trouble really believing at bottom that an upper manager was really that committed to retaining me.

Two days ago, I stopped g-boss in the hall (gotta think up a good alias for him) and said I was really getting worried now, with the end of the month just a week away.  He told me yet again that he was not going to let me be escorted out, and that if it came to the worst, he would call one of the managers under him and say, “I have this guy with lots of gumption and talent, and I need to park him somewhere for the short term.  Make it so.” He also said it looked as though there were some projects being generated from divisional strategy meetings this week, in which he was involved, that would call for somebody “with your particular skill set,” and that was another reason why he’d find a short-term gig for me until the projects could mature.

I reminded him that I was already working as a loan-in on another team that handles full-system exchanges and certain cancellations, and perhaps that manager could use me for a while.  He replied, “you know, you’re right and I’d forgotten about that.”  I also told him I had worked out a couple of big improvements midstream to the Ghost server project that I’d been working on in our hardware lab since last August, and I’d like to be able to follow through applying the improvements to the systems I’d done early in the project, before I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Yesterday afternoon he hunted me down and said he’d talked to the manager of the team I’d been loaned to, who said there was plenty of work to keep me busy and it wouldn’t have to disrupt anyone’s headcount, which would make HR happy, and that I’d also have the opportunity to keep working on the server project, and was that a deal?  I agreed to it at once, and I’m to transfer officially to the new team as of Monday.

And in other news . . . I have finally joined the Digital Nomads™ and bought a new-to-me portable computer, a lease-return Dell Latitude D620, about three years old.  It has a respectable dual-core processor, two gigs of RAM, 100MB hard drive, a good wireless LAN card and Bluetooth card, and a DVD+/-RW drive.  Next thing is to get an access point device that supports the IEEE 802.11g standard.  The 802.11b WAP I’m using now is a dog for performance.

A brassy owl has bartered a plank of plankton.  Fnord.