[legion]

I've been posting mostly in the evenings as I've gotten enormously busy at work.

A little history...

Back in February, I was essentially told to stop working as I was 1-2 years ahead of schedule on my project and other teams were up to a year behind schedule. My asking questions of them for future releases (I've had the upcoming first release done for two years) was slowing down their work on version 1 of the product.

Suddenly, I had nothing to do. I work in an obscure language (Aion) so I don't have the skills to jump in and help other teams (who use COBOL or Java). I've signed up to take the Java training (11 weeks long), but the class has been rescheduled multiple times and when they do settle on a date in conflicts with vacation or business travel, so I end up having to reschedule.

Back in April I got assigned to an additional team doing pure SQL type work, but any actual work never materialized. (The lead for that team tends to hit up the same three people for all assignments while the other twelve people on the team sit idle.) I was literally asking for work daily--sometimes multiple times a day--and getting nothing.

In May I got permission to resume my other work that had been put on hold. It took me a month to just get organized and get everyone moving again after a four-month pause. That work is now humming along and I'm rather busy, but eventually I'll be done and the project will still have two more years to go. Because this is the largest, most important project my company has ever undertaken, the chance of me being released at that point to do other work is exactly zero.

Last Thursday my project manager asked me if I'd be willing to join this other team. Wednesday I relocated to a different building to join the team. I now have two desks in two different buildings with two different teams. I'm finding myself running back and forth constantly.

For years, I've resisted getting a pager or company cell phone, but I found myself requesting a Blackberry on Thursday. I'm busy as hell and I love it--which is weird because I worked my ass off in college and have kind of coasted a little since as I recoved from taking a full course load and working full time while doing a double-major in four years.

Yeah, Friday morning is slow. No fires to put out yet. (That's kind of my new job, sort of a generalized IT firefighter.)