Saturday, January 15, 2011

Having a Job Is Time Consuming

The fact that having a job is time-consuming might be obvious to most people, but I forgot just exactly how little free time you have when working 40 hours a week, plus another 10 hours (30 min. each way, 5 days) commuting.

I'm still here, and I read everyone's posts when I get a chance, and have done zero commenting. I have so much to catch up on.

I think I wrote the last post about my job before I actually started. I was under the impression that I would be working at a help desk in a hospital. That's not exactly the case. I work for...well, I'd rather not have anyone search the name of the company and have my blog come up, but it's three words. First word is a major religion with the pope as its leader. Second word is the opposite of sickness, or a type of insurance we'd all like to have. Third word, initiatives. Well, I don't actually work for them yet, since it's a contract to hire position. I work for the contractor right now, but I really like the job and I think they like me pretty well, so I'm hoping that sooner rather than later, I will be hired on and then my family will have...you know, that type of insurance we'd all like to have.

So I work not in a hospital, but in a very, very nice office with a room full of (mostly) very cool people, and we support about 70 hospitals from that room. Calls range from nurses who lock themselves out of every medical computer application known to man (those are the easy ones), to help with an Excel spreadsheet, to "I can't find my personal files in Outlook", to "I need a shared drive mapped to my computer." There are also calls about phones and printers and scanners and such where we just send a ticket to their local IT people. Then there are the calls about which I am completely clueless, and have to ask for help. But that's ok, everyone in the room is always asking questions of co-workers. And I find that as time goes by, I'm having to ask fewer questions, which is good.

In a nutshell, I really like the job, like the office, like the people. Being away from the house 50 hours a week is the only hard part. I work from 11am to 7:30pm right now. The nice part is that I am able to get up with the kids in the morning and get them off to school, then still have a little time to get a few things done around the house. The bad part is not getting home until 8pm. Luckily, I have Shannon to watch Kylie, and she's doing a pretty good job.

Speaking of Shannon...

How is it that this little rugrat turned 16 this past week? My middle child is 16. Sad that she's growing up? Yes. But with the passing of time also comes the passing of the adolescent angst, thank God. She and her boyfriend Jacob just passed the 10 month mark, and they seem pretty happy. He's a nice kid, if not so much in the ambition department, and he's sweet to her, so it's all good at this point.

Speaking of kids, Danni is home! She leaves for basic training a month from today. It's so nice to have her back. Three months of living on her own has really changed her for the better, I think. The "I'm 18 and you can't tell me what to do" attitude is gone, and I feel like I have my daughter back. She is excited to start basic, because she wants to get her life going. She is going to be going in as an E3, and is on an RN track, with her army job title being Health Care Specialist. For now, she is enjoying sleeping in and spending time with her sisters.

I promise, very soon, to visit all of you and see what you are up to. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new year!