New Year

Us at my company's holiday party

The New Year has happened, and I'm already back into the swing of things. The days off were nice, even if our travel was quite eventful (in the bad sort of way). I'm currently about four-and-a-half months into my tenure at my current job as a data analyst at Zynga. I really enjoy my job. It has its ups and downs, but all jobs do. I enjoy my work, the only issue might be that my team just needs another analyst, for which we are currently hiring. My coworkers are quite enjoyable. Even though we're distributed across the company on various teams, I enjoy the company of my fellow analysts at our regular meetings or when we meet for lunch.

Twenty-twelve was quite the eventful year for us. We got married, moved across the country, and I started a new job. All of these are big things on the "Most Stressful Events of Your Life" list, but it's worked out pretty well. We've had to downsize our living space in order to fit into the San Francisco Bay Area residential market, going from a small house to an apartment. Our apartment is nice and so is the complex, but it's definitely just a temporary arrangement.

Being married has been interesting. It hasn't changed who we are or how we interact in any major way, but it's this slight thing that's always there. The plain band on my finger is always there to remind me that there is this amazing woman who loves me, even when I make mistakes. She's wonderful and sometimes I wonder why she puts up with my dumb butt.

This blog has stood neglected due to my lack of time. To be honest much of my blogging I would do at work at my last job because I had the spare time, which I don't now. This just means that I'm not so bored at work any more, which is a good thing.

I take the BART to and from work each day, with roughly one hour and fifteen minutes of total commute each way. I usually spend my time on the train playing a game on my Vita. My current obsession has been Patapon. I used to walk to and from the BART stations but it's been colder so that's fallen a bit to the wayside and I've been taking the shuttle from the station to work. The temperatures here don't vary as much as they did in Arkansas, especially in San Francisco. There's very little temperature variance there. The ocean and the Bay have quite a stabilizing effect.

Life is good. I like where I am and the direction I'm heading. My work is great, I'm learning so many useful skills and people really seem to value my opinions (which is always nice). I'm positive about the future. I think 2013 is going to be a good year.

It hasn't been a good week.

The only thing keeping me going.

This week has been a pretty bad week. The first bad thing is that on Wednesday, Sarah got into a car wreck when she was leaving work. Someone was coming but they had their blinker on and were slowing down like they were going to turn in. She went out but they kept going straight. They told the officer that they were slowing down to turn in down the road, despite the fact that the next turn in was at least 150 feet down the road and it would have been irresponsible to turn on their blinker and slow down that early. She is fortunately completely fine despite the fact that, even at the slow speed the accident occurred at, this is what happened to her car

The door is ruined, the frame where the door latches to the car is bent, nothing forms a seal to keep out the elements, the door doesn't open, and the inside is a bit squished too. The paramedics and the officer were very surprised that she was okay. They would look at the car and then back at her and ask, "Are you sure you're okay." We went to the doctor the next day just to make sure and yeah, she's okay.

Right now we're in the how-much-would-this-cost-to-fix-and-would-it-be-better-just-to-sell-it-for-parts-and-buy-something-else phase. We're looking around and will hopefully have that cleared up in the next week or so. We're going to start by trying the maybe-we-can-just-use-one-vehicle strategy, with our schedules it will probably work, even if it may trap her at home when I'm at work (unless she wants to take me to work <wink>).

It gets worse
At work on Friday we learned that the medicare contract that we work is (finally) going to be awarded to another company. This means that at some point in the next (roughly) three months I won't have a job there anymore. They're looking for work to do once the contract expires, but everything that's been talked about essentially wouldn't include me.

This contract bidding process has apparently been going on for five years, and was something that I knew about when I accepted the job. I accepted the job because, well, I hadn't had a 'real job' doing statistics before and I definitely needed the experience/recommendation/everything so that I could leverage it for a job that I really wanted. I even knew that we would be hearing about the contract this week or next and I knew that we probably wouldn't get it, but actually having it happen really hits hard.

So now begins the process of looking for a new job. Although I'm certainly going to be checking local (central Arkansas) places for jobs, I'm not optimistic of the prospects. So I'm definitely going to be checking other states (mostly more northern states) for places to work. I'll also be doing online searches and other things. You'll probably hear more about this in the future from me. I have literally drawn up a document that I have called my "Action Plan" for how I'm going to deal with this.

If I had to describe everything in a picture, it would be this:

OH, and Fred broke my watch last week, also. It wasn't intentional, since he's a cat and I don't think he harbors ill will against my watch, but it is no less frustrating. It's just the band and I'm 99% sure it can be fixed, but UGH.

There are some other things going on now, but they aren't definite so I won't talk about it yet. This would be something very positive that I'm quite excited about. It's a reaction to what has happened above and would make me very happy.

Dinner Tonight

We went to IHOP for dinner tonight, because I owed Sarah breakfast for dinner, and some really interesting stuff was going on at the tables near us. At the table behind Sarah, the guy spent the whole time talking about Coke, as in Coca Cola. First he talked about the Coke Freestyle machines and how they're super cool and how they were designed by Ferrari (I don't actually know if that's true). Then he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about New Coke and about where it was a great or terrible business decision. He has apparently written at least 3 papers about Coke and, from what I could observe, was drinking a Coke during the meal. He was with a woman. I presume they were on a date, since I'd think that if you were in a relationship with someone you would have already released your Coke craziness on them before you managed to make it to that point.

At another table nearby, I first noticed that the guy was just staring at his phone and completely ignoring the woman he was with. As I paid more attention, things started to seem more unfortunate to me. I could tell that she was talking to him, but that he was hardly saying anything, if anything at all. She was leaned forward, staring at him directly, really trying to engage with him but he continued to ignore her. She was even holding his free hand across the table as she was trying to engage him in conversation. I only saw him make eye contact with her briefly. Even when their food came, phone.

It really seemed like she was trying to talk to him about something important. Sarah said it seemed like he felt guilty about something. I felt really bad for her. I wanted to go up to her and say something like, "Are you okay?" when he went to the bathroom. I wanted to tell her that he would probably always be a dick and that she shouldn't be with him, but I felt if I did so it wouldn't be well received and would be an incredibly awkward gesture. Now I kinda with I had said something to her. She deserves better.

The last weird thing was that at one point our waiter asked us if we would like to make a donation to the Arkansas Children's Hospital, which we did take the time to do. The weird part was that he told us that his manager isn't only making them ask patrons to do this, but that if they don't perform successfully at soliciting these donations from people that they will lose shifts, since the donations are a big tax writeoff for the company. I just thought that was horrible. I'm not at all surprised that a manager would do that, but I'm very disappointed that they would do that. I left a fairly nice tip for our waiter for having to put up with that kind of shit.

Well, I Won't Be Working There Much Longer

Piggy

Probably. Yesterday, I found out that my work had approved me to work full-time instead of as a contractor. Same pay, and I'll get benefits and time off. There's a problem though. Today at 3:00 we had a company-wide meeting. At the meeting we found out that we had lost the bid for the Medicare contracts we have. So by July at the earliest, we won't have that work any more. The process may be delayed a bit, but it will eventually happen.

I'm still going to be picked up for full-time. There was actually an ulterior motive to making me full-time. As a full-time employee I'll have first dibs on any jobs that show up at Blue Cross. Even still, the company isn't necessarily going away. They are, and have been, looking into new business that they can take on. So the company isn't dead, they may not need me in the future, but they aren't dead. Like I said before, I'll still be doing this particular job at least until July.

Aside from that, if I'm let go around then that opens up the possibility of moving somewhere and doing something else. I have experience under my belt now and could probably get a real job much easier now than it was for me before.

Overall, I'm not at all bummed about this. It's a weird thing to say, but I'm very fine with it. Medicare wasn't something that I wanted to spend my life doing. I see this as a way to transition to bigger and better things. Also, as compensation, we get to wear jeans for the rest of our time. Casual Friday is now everyday! YAY.

In a final bit of potpourri news, we got a rice cooker, and it's awesome.

I love me some rice.

Happenings

Many things have all happened today. The first was that I went and got a haircut this morning. I'd been putting off getting one for a long time because I'm cheap AND lazy. My hair was way too long for the heat that we've been having, plus it would need to be cut just in case I had a job interview (or something important like that).

Speaking of....later in the day, I received a call from my mom, who had just run into an old friend whose company they work for is in dire need of someone who can work with SAS. She told her about me and I've sent off my resume and talked to some people already and I'm 90% sure that I have a full-time job. I may find out on Monday that I'll have a job.

Then this afternoon, right as I was about to make a phone call concerning this job, I received a phone call from Acxiom wanting me to interview for a job that I had applied for with them. This one would be a DBA Assistant, which wouldn't be directly what I want to do on a permanent basis, but it would be something, I set up the interview for Wednesday, but I'll cancel if I get this other job since I'd rather do something with my field (for obvious reasons).

Clearly, I should have gotten a haircut sooner, since Occam's Razor dictates that all of this happened because I finally got one. It would suffice to say that I'm REALLY EXCITED AND HAPPY RIGHT NOW!

::fingers crossed::