New Job, Global Pandemic - NBD, Really

In the midst of a global pandemic, I started a new job.

It's not like I did this on purpose. I wasn't just bored and said to myself, "Well. I don't have enough stress and chaos in my life, let's throw that secure job out the window and try something new!"  But, through a combination of organizational change, conflicting schedules, and someone apparently eating a bat(?), here I am.

It's just as scary as I thought it would be. There's the normal first day stress - what do I wear, who do I ask for help, how do I know I'm doing the right training or attending the right meeting.

There's also what I'll call WTF Pandemic Stress.

Some WTFPS is just an amped-up version of normal first day stress: What do I wear when my orientation will be remote? I'll have to turn the webcam on - Do I need a suit jacket? or pants? Okay, yes, I definitely need pants - are jeans okay? Should I be wearing shoes?

But most WTFPS is bizarre, WTF am I doing, stress.  For example:

• Literally everyone at the company is working from home - I can't wander the office halls until I find someone who can give me some direction. Do I just ping random people until I find someone who can help me? There are close to 2000 people at this company - that seems like a terrible idea. It may become necessary. 
• I have no idea who my boss is - like, none. I think maybe I have two? or three? Someone who is my "team coordinator" reached out, but they specifically called out that they are not my manager. The person who is most likely to be my manager can't meet with me until next week. Who am I supposed to be taking direction from? 
• How do I know what this company is actually like? Usually the first week is key - is everyone laughing and chatting, or is the office silent? Do engineers have stickers on their laptops? Are people silently rolling their eyes when I ask for help or not? I NEED BODY LANGUAGE TO UNDERSTAND PEOPLE. 

WTFPS also works against the seemingly positive things about this new job and its weird remote orientation.  Everyone I've talked to so far has been super sympathetic and kind - is this normal? Would I be told to relax and take things at my own pace if I were in the office? Should I feel bad that my motivation is low because I'm sick of being trapped in my house and I mostly want to play Animal Crossing while I listen to training videos?

There's no remote equivalent of being in the office, especially right now. There just isn't.

Am I being paranoid? Probably. Is it justified? Again, probably.
This is a global pandemic. Why tf am I starting a new job again?

No Easy Answers

Back in February, I got a new job.

It was not something I was expecting -- one minute, I was planning on leaving after six months with the company, and the next, I was recruited off the help desk and into an actual career path I hadn't even known existed.

I'm a Business Analyst now, working with the development team of the same company that first took a chance on me last year.  My days are filled with requirements and use cases and acceptance criteria, with solving problems and studying and incredibly dry textbooks -- so like what I was doing before I moved into IT, before I changed my life.

It feels very similar, but I have to hope it won't take 150 hours of outside-the-office work to feel capable (like last time).

In transitioning to a new team, I've gained back some of what I thought I'd lost when I left teaching.  Suddenly, there is more laughter in my day.  I tolerated most of my coworkers, but I genuinely like the developer on my team, who loves musicals and dogs and is just as sarcastic as I am.  I like the head of AppDev, who is nerdy and drives a sweet car and loves to talk about anything, like I do.  I love my boss, who is enthusiastic and energetic and so positive it's almost overwhelming.

Suddenly, I'm surrounded by people for whom technology is a passion, not just a job.  I love it.

And even if I don't love the mission of my company, I was prepared to keep right on going until I hit a year or more of experience.  I was prepared to keep learning and practicing and getting better until I was more than qualified to find a new gig at a bigger, more likable company.

Until last Thursday.

Last Thursday, my boss announced she was leaving.  June 1st is her last day.

As is easy to imagine, this threw me for a bit of a tailspin.

I genuinely like my boss.  She spent months giving me advice and direction for how to improve my skills while I was bored on the help desk.  When the opportunity arose for her to create a business analyst position on the dev team, she jumped at it -- and convinced upper management that I was the right person for the job.  She has spent countless hours with me doing training, finding resources for me to learn, and giving me feedback to help me grow.  She's even funded my membership to two professional organizations, including a local one so I can get involved in my field.

On top of that, she's spent the last two months building our dev team into one worth working on.  She's built a great data services team, recruited an App/Dev manager who is an expert in the field, and found some awesome devs to actually do the work.  She's protected us from unreasonable requests from leadership, helped us navigate some truly awful deadlines and expectations, and through it all, she's talked up how much amazing work we are doing.

In all, she's an incredible person, and I love working for her.

Now she's leaving.

It shadows my whole future with question marks -- Just how much did she protect us from the mess of senior leadership?  What's about to happen with the dev team? With my BA training?  Should I leave?  Will someone hire me when I only have six months experience  in the field? If I don't leave, can I tough it out, or will it send me straight back to the same disastrous mental health issues I'd finally left behind?

There are no easy answers.

As much as I love her, her decision is a little cutthroat too.  Our new App/Dev manager joined the firm less than a month ago, wooed away from a long career as a dev and a consultant by my boss.  The primary developer on our team took the job on a recommendation from a friend on the data services team, which my boss ran.

And without her intervention and support, I would have been gone months ago.  It was never that I loved working for a semi-shady law firm; it was that working with her made it worth it to stay.

We have a built a team here, and suddenly our fearless leader is leaving.

She wants me to go with her.  Supposedly, her new company has an open business analyst position, and she wants me to apply.  She's talking me up to her recruiter and manager, trying to get them to see what she sees in me.  I'm flattered, really --  having someone else so invested in my career is strange to say the least.  But I also don't know if it'll happen.  Her company is a big one, and big companies don't always like to take chances on young careers.  If I'm lucky, they might.  If I'm really lucky, all those question marks will dissipate into some very solid, high-dollar exclamation points.

Like she already has, my boss could change my life.

But it's slow going, like everything in corporate America, and instead for the next few weeks, all I can do is learn as much as possible and hope that maybe, just maybe, my new job can be my future one, too.

If I Start Wearing Purple at Work, No One Will Get It

Last week, I fulfilled a years-old curiosity: I went to see Gogol Bordello.

If you've never heard of them, Gogol Bordello is a Gypsy punk rock back from NYC, and they sound exactly like you'd expect from that description.  If you've heard of them, it's probably for "Start Wearing Purple":

Just about every tattoo parlor I've ever been in has them playing on repeat in the background. They've made documentaries about their band and added their bizarre sound to a variety of eclectic movie soundtracks, and they have more band members than I have fingers.  Years ago, the frontman was the lead in the movie Everything is Illuminated, opposite Elijah Wood, and spent the movie (as far as I can tell) being himself.

The band lives for the stage; they tour relentlessly, almost nomadic like their Gypsy-inspired sound, and they are known and loved for their on-stage performance and energy.

Even though I can only name the one song, I've always wanted to see them.  They live as a constant presence in the back of my mind, all tumbling chords and pounding drums and cheerful accordions.

So when I got the opportunity, I bought tickets immediately.  Poor Bishop -- he didn't have a choice; he was going too.

We drove to the venue a few nights ago with the same repeated sentiment: This was an experience.  If the show was awful, we'd leave, but we needed to see them.  Needed to experience it, just to see what it was like.  If the Wikipedia stories of their insanity were true.

They were.

By the second song in,  frontman Eugene Hutz had produced a bottle of wine from somewhere and proceeded to tear the cork out with his teeth.  He waved it around as he danced, unbuttoned-to-his-waist shirttails flying, while next to him, a 70 year old music professor positively wailed on his electric violin.  By the end of the concert, he'd broken half the horse hairs of his bow.

By the fourth song, their second-best known called Wonderlust King, the little kids and the braless women surrounding us were losing their shit dancing, the kids up on the table next to us as their parents danced behind them.  The according player on stage stood on top of the speakers and made faces at the audience while he gave Weird Al Yankovich a run for his polka-loving money.

The opera singer came out next, wearing a steam-punk floor-length orange leather jacket over leggings and binoculars, her stunning voice soaring over the Russian pouring from Hutz's mouth.

Then came the brass section, four guys in white shirts and Beetlejuice-stripped black and white pants that I quickly realized had been hanging out with the audience before the show (they'd been right behind us, actually - how was I supposed to know that the pants and the lime-green headband meant they were in the band??).  These guys, complete with trombone, trumpet, saxophone, and baritone, proceeded to rock the next three or four songs until Hutz took a break to take off his military jacket -- and then the saxophone player got into a duel with the violinist in the most insane, talented display of playing I may have ever seen.  The saxophone player could match every note of every arpeggio rolling off the strings, something I didn't think was even possible outside a symphony.

Even the frontman couldn't resist, and when they booted up the next song, wine bottle in hand, he waved all the horns back out, the opera singer produced an enormous marching band drum, and the drummer himself came out front to sing.  His white shirt was stained pink by the end.

The drum ended up in the audience for the finale, Hutz standing atop it to alternate between conducting the audience and the band (and the bouncers right behind him to catch him if he decided to crowd surf).  The crowd itself was so loud, and so enthusiastic, that when he aimed the mic to let the venue sing the refrain, I could actually understand the words.  That just doesn't happen.

Don't judge the quality of my smartphone camera :) 

And then the lights went purple.

I've seen a lot of fabulous concerts over the years -- I've seen Davey Havok walk across the hands of a mosh pit and Chris Cornell sing a duet with Chester Bennington.  I've seen Dave Mustaine rock the solos of Hanger 18, Bruce Dickinson climb the speakers to wave a British flag during The Trooper, and Gerard Way force the audience to pray to his dead grandmother.  Hell, I've seen Ninja Sex Party cover Asia's Heat of the Moment and Papa Emeritas conduct his ghouls with GHOST.

Gogol Bordell wasn't better than all of those, but it is rare that I've seen a finale with more excitement, more energy, than the refrain to Start Wearing Purple.

It was an experience I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it did throw some things into sharp relief.

Bishop went with me; like me, he was curious about the rumored energy and theatrics of this band, and like me, he was not disappointed.  But... he is the only one I shared this experience with.  I didn't walk into work the next morning excited to share the story with anyone; no one asked.  No one cared. They talk about cholesterol levels and church gatherings and grandchildren, and only rarely do they ask about my life, my interests.  My coworkers and I don't exchange stories -- we exchange problems. We aren't friends.

So though I like my job, my new career, I miss my old... life, really.  I miss seeing my friends on a daily basis.  I miss having people to eat lunch with and share stories with, that daily dose of empathy and laughter that always bolstered the necessary courage to deal with the rest of the day.

I am lonely at work in a way I wasn't expecting.

This isn't necessarily bad -- everything I'm learning requires so much work, so much effort and sheer concentration, that I don't have much time for fan theories or discussions over character development in Stranger Things 2.  Being on my own is freeing sometimes because I can push myself further, faster, than I've ever done before.

I'm going to need it.  In less than two months, I'm starting the job search once again, this time looking for a bigger, more professional place to really grow now that I've kicked down the IT door.

Maybe, just maybe, I can find a place with people I will love, people who want to talk about Thor: Ragnarok and argue about which new Star Wars movie is the best and swoon over all the UST between Dean Winchester and Castiel.

And if I'm really lucky, one day some coworker will ask what I did last night, and their face will light up when I brag that I got to see Gogol Bordello, and I can start wearing purple to work again.

An Opportunity

On my second to last day of school, my department took me out to lunch to celebrate.

It was what you'd expect -- lots of hugs and toasts and congratulations as I change careers. There were conversations about where I'm going, and why I decided to leave, and not a few people mentioned they'd never once thought I was unhappy.  One colleague called me a lifer, like teaching is a prison sentence.

That right there tells you a lot about my mindset.

When someone inevitably asked what I'm going to miss about teaching, it took me embarrassingly long to answer.  Eventually though, after kicking around about a dozen things I won't miss, I settled on the people.

It's the truth: I will miss my colleagues and friends at Herbert High.  It's been a great place to learn and build a skill set, an awesome place to make friends, and for a lot of people, a place to spend their entire careers.  Many of my colleagues in my department have been there for a decade or longer, and they are happy there.  I will miss all that.

And this stands in stark contrast to my new job, where I will know no one.

That's the most important part, which I keep reminding myself: I have a job.  It's not the job I thought I'd have, the one I've been writing about for months.  That job vanished into a haze of office politics and fighting managers and never-ending budget cuts to the point where it's not even than they aren't hiring me; they aren't hiring anyone.  What was a vacancy has become true downsizing.

In a lot of ways, losing that job isn't all that bad.  Bishop and I know most of the people there, and suddenly they're all telling us that really, I don't want to be there right now.  That the office politics that made hiring me into a point of contention between two managers are actually widespread conflict in the department.  That there's no money for upgrading the tech, let alone hiring someone.  That the manager on the floor is back to the age-old questioning of "What do we pay the IT people for?" when he should know better than anyone.

And, perhaps most surprising, that many of them are looking for jobs away from this one.

It adds up to mean that maybe I don't want that job anyway.

This info makes a lot of things better.  But it also doesn't change some things, and when you struggle with anxiety, things like an easy transition and knowing who you'll eat lunch with the first day are important.

So when I say that I will miss my friends, I mean it.

I'm no longer walking into a new job knowing people.  That was a huge part of the appeal -- I was going to know everyone! I'd know my boss, because he used to be Bishop's boss, because I've gone to baseball games and happy hours with him.  I'd know my colleagues, because we've played D&D together, because we've gone bowling, because they've had LAN parties in my basement, because they're my friends.

It would have been the easiest transition ever -- I might be new to the field, but I knew the people.

Instead, that's not what's happening.  I do have a job, and it's essentially the same thing: tech support.  It pays better than the other job.  It has the same or better benefits, perks, all that stuff.  It's smaller, so I'll get more personalized support as I start learning more hands-on skills.  I like it.

But it's not the same place I've spent the last year thinking I'd be working, so even if it turns out to be amazing, it will always be a little less.  If the other place were to offer me a job in six months or a year, I'd jump at it without question.

I don't know these new people.

I know the possibilities though.  When I walked into Herbert five years ago, I wasn't thinking about the future.  I didn't consider that some of the conversations I had those first days were happening with people who would end up being some of my best friends.  I walked into Herbert without knowing a soul, and was lucky enough to love it for a long time.  That could very well happen here, again, and five years from now I could be in a place I never expected.

I just have to cross my fingers and hope for it.

A lot is changing that I am looking forward to.

I will never have to grade a paper again.  I will never argue with parents about their kid's grades or effort or anything else.  I will never have to sit in awkward meetings with principals while they attempt to get a 15yo to agree that putting "ISIS can suck my dick" on their in-class presentation is in fact inappropriate.  I will never have pretend to care that a kid said shit (or worse) in my classroom.  I will never have to attend a pep assembly or homecoming parade.   I will never have to confiscate a phone, or a golf ball, or a fidget spinner.

I am sure that, instead, I will get a host of new annoyances, like any job.  There will be paperwork that's frustrating or busywork, annoying coworkers, and since it's new, I have to believe I'll be forced to play at least one mind-numbing 'icebreaker' game.

That's all okay.  In exchange, I get to do a lot of things that are new and exciting, and it won't take long before the frustrations of my old job start to fade.

At my new job, I'll never have to confiscate a phone or computer again.  Instead, I get to actually work with them -- solve problems, help others fix things, figure out new ways of going about issues.  I'll get to do all the background stuff no one thinks about, like digging through the Control Panel for the right settings, or migrating data, or editing the Registry to make things easier.  I will get to enjoy technology instead of police it.

And I will never have to deal with teenagers again.  Sometimes teenagers are great -- they'll open your eyes to new ideas and viewpoints, they come in excited to share events and stories, they'll hug you goodbye and mean it on the last day of school.  But most of the time, even the best of them are frustrating -- they don't want to do homework, they're quiet during in-class discussions, they openly admit that they don't start their papers until the night before they're due.  I won't miss any of those things, even if I might occasionally miss the kids themselves.

I won't travel, which was a part of the other job I was conflicted about.  I like to travel, but I was never sure about traveling one out of every three weeks -- that's a lot of time on the road, a lot of time to sleep in a hotel and eat at crappy restaurants and miss Bishop.  The trade, that I have a job where I'll travel at most twice a year, is actually quite nice.

And sure, I have to get an iPhone, which to a devout Android user is like voluntarily contracting the plague.  But it's a phone coming from my company, not my personal phone, and more than anything, it's an opportunity to grow and keep learning.

Really, all of this transition, this mess of uncertainty where I have a job but another might call me in a week or a month or a year, is just an opportunity to learn.  That's what I keep coming back to: No matter how this plays out, no matter if the boss I know at the other jobs puts me in an awkward position in a month, no matter if this new job is where I stay for years, this is an incredible opportunity to change my life.

That is never bad.