So as it seems to be these days, a long time since my last post.
Work is... well, I'm surviving quite well, and everyone seems happy with me, but I'm finding myself the victim of someone among our third party vendors. This is the same vendor who essentially replaced me at ex-work for on-call issues, who I had a meet with after losing my job with no luck, and who I now have to work with quite often.
It's awkward to say the best, because I'm having to walk on eggshells -- I want to raise bloody hell about things they haven't exactly done well, but at the same time, I could see how it could be mistaken as me getting retribution on them for taking my job. (Decidedly not the case.)
Unfortunately, it seems like one of the techs at this vendor who did some work for my ex-employer is now spreading bad shit about me not only among his colleagues, but because he is an ex-employee of where I CURRENTLY work, among the people he still knows there.
Now mind you, I have *never* had any qualms with my old employer. Solid performance reviews. And I'll admit that there were things there that were in bad shape, but most of the time this was because I either A) had no budget to fix them, or B) wasn't able to do the downtime to fix them because of the internal web hosting. A good chunk of the problems I left behind were those inherited from my predecessor... and I'll admit, some mistakes of my own -- but that's understandable when you're an IT staff of ONE.
At my present job, I was quite literally thrown in the deep end. The guy training me walked off the job before he finished training me, and of my two co-workers, one has only been there a few months longer than I, and the other has the knowledge to help us, but has his own responsibilities and duties (and lately, major challenges) to keep up with. And despite all of this, things are running well and the old timers in our group point out that we've made *significant* strides in our operations -- my newer co-worker with a major shift in intranet systems, myself with patch management, and both of us with virtualization. And even despite being a man down and half-trained, we've pulled off several upgrades, certified Windows 7 for general use *and* as I understand it, done quite well in recent annual audits. There are people singing our praises out there, people who have been quite happy with our approach to getting things done and doing them right. And I'm still happy there -- this has been an excellent opportunity to learn a lot of new stuff.
But I have these storm clouds hanging over me. There are people there who put more stock in what this ex-employee says than what our actions account for, which isn't surprising considering that there's a lot of work that goes on in IT behind the scenes in the financial industry that you don't know about. It makes work much harder when the people have this preconceived notion that you don't know how to do your job.
And I'm not the only one being "dissed" by this ex-worker too.
At any rate, it looks like we'll finally fill our vacancy in January, and my boss has been raving about him, so I'm looking forward to having some extra support on the help desk and an extra brain to kick ideas around with.
Moving on.
First real cold weather of the year has hit, and right away, my door latch is sticking. Driver's side door closes and latches ONLY if the door is locked, and only by the electronic door lock. (The physical locking device I'd push to lock is frozen too.) On the upside though, finally got some windshield washer fluid with de-icer in it, after finding out my wiper blades have this god-awful tendancy to chunk with ice and stop clearing my windshield nicely.
Financially... dancing on a knife edge. Too soon to tell about taxes.
Living without cable... not quite as easy as I'd hoped. No sooner had I returned the cable box when, surprise surprise, the site I normally torrent TV from had been shut down legally to just "content published openly" by the creator -- read as "indie movies and music videos." Hulu has been a help, but they still don't cover some of the shows I watch... and I found out that the other sites I can watch TV on are distributing truly viral videos -- WMVs that have Media Player go out and download a codec that includes virus. And that it's not even a true copy of the show, just one that's doctored to look big and have the "right" filename.
Not really finding myself interested in much lately, though I have gotten my character's training in EVE back on track after a 3 month hiatus. Pulled myself out of the mining op I'd been using in Aki., since mining in highsec is kinda pointless if you aren't doing it between 8 AM - 2 PM. Spent a little money to fit out myself with a proper battlecruiser to match my skills, and I'm in my normal home base, right on the edge of lo-sec space in Caldari space. Deciding what I want to do next -- the new corp finder thing in Dominion is nice, but I'm still somewhat burned from my last corp experience... and there's the issue of only really being able to play 3 hours on evenings tops. I suppose what I'd really like to do is to be able to practice some PVP in T1 frigs, something where I can learn how to fight without the issue of being pod killed.... especially as for once, I can finally fit out a fleet of frigs with the money I've saved.
Of course, I'm going to need to start bringing in more money soon as well, so I wouldn't mind a decent mining op. After all, I still have all my equipment from Aki to use.
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