[Schumi]

In 48 hours I will be packing up and leaving my wonderful condo in Hermosa Beach CA to move to the east side of the SF bay. For work relocation. Same company, different job.

I absolutely hate moving. I always feel better afterwards, but during it sucks. Added to that is that I have to be up there for work by monday, but have not been able to find a place to live or pack any belongings. So I am leaving my girlfriend behind for the rest of the month to take care of the shipping company that will be taking my things for me to northern california, which scares the hell out of me. I've never had a whole apartment shipped. Whenever I've moved before I've never had more than two suitcases and a backpack. Most of the items are hers, I've realized. Besides a TV, everything of mine still almost fits into two suitcases and a backpack.

To add to this though, I have a lot to do as soon as I arrive on Monday and will need my computer, which is a special workstation. This is not a cheap laptop with some excel spreadsheets on it. It is a 90-pound tower packing six arrayed terrabyte hard drives and two graphics cards with 64GB of RAM and sixteen cores split over two processors. Along with a 30-inch LCD. So I ask if this can be shipped up by monday and I get vague answers to if it could be there or not on time. I'm told I can take it with me if I want it for sure Monday morning. Great.

So I currently have to figure out a way to pack a massive computer with incredibly proprietary data stored on it along with a 30 inch monitor and anything else I need to live off of until I find an apartment into a Lotus Elise for a 7 hour drive. And I don't even know where I'm staying. I'm doing all of this without my significant other as she will not be allowed to relocate offices like I. It has been very tough.

All this due to a career decision to leave my current office/working group to be a part of another. It was one of those situations where I felt my skills and knowledge would best be used elsewhere but I did not want to leave the company as a whole. I interviewed for a job at another one of our (far larger) offices and got the job, which ended up possibly burning some bridges locally with those currently managing me. It's a one way trip.

I'm doing it not for a pay increase (there is no salary increase), not for a better place to live (I'm leaving an awesome, cheap condo at the beach to a more expensive, boring neighborhood), and not for better working conditions (they will be far longer hours with far more stress, more than likely).

I'm doing it because I was tired of not being in a place to advance a career. So starts about two weeks of hell to make this all work.

I'm hoping this isn't a start of me losing my mind.