01797: Work Ups And Downs

In terms of work, I'd like to think that I'm the kind of guy who's always up for a challenge. My career, as it stands today, has been filled with my fair (?) share of significant obstacles that required a lot of creative effort to get past. As I look back at past efforts has me amused at far I've grown as a manager, and perhaps as an employee in general. I'm definitely more sure of myself and in my present role I feel a lot more empowered to make decisions and broker deals in order to solve problems.

My work day today was sort of a lot of that. Despite the prevailing holiday atmosphere going on, today was just majorly busy. Grueling may be a better way to describe things given all that I had to do. Getting a new program stared, even a tiny one like the one I've been managing, is no easy feat. What more when you have a very aggressive timeline.What more when you have a major holiday period right smack in the middle of things taking out a huge chunk of time and also shutting down entire departments that favor local holidays versus US holidays.

But on the bright side, working out of our QC facility put me back in contact with a lot of folks who had once worked directly for me or that I had actually trained once. And given my 10+ years with the company, there's a lot of potential history to dig into.

Good story today - I got to connect with a former trainee that I had actually hired myself. It was a big gamble to get her since her resume was less than ideal at the time, but I really felt that I had a lot to work with given her amazing voice. And it's nice to see that over 5 years later she's still in the company and is doing well. What was even more interesting is that she still tells people the story of how she got into the company and the hard time I gave her during her interview.

No matter how crazy stressful things can get, there are those little things that make things go all that much better. That and chocolate-covered raisins.