Posts Tagged: work
More Sunset
End of Shift (click image to view large)
This was the view from my window at work in Oakland the other day. It has been pretty dramatic for several weeks now. Usually I don’t notice while I’m still working because I have the shade down and I’m hurrying to wrap things up and head home.
Good-bye Faithful Cubicle
My former cubicle. Two screens for my company laptop, and one for my CG workstation.
Today was my last day with current employer, Truestone, which contracts with the Feds, primarily the Coast Guard. They provide many different kinds of IT and electronics services, as well as document preparation and process development. I spent the last year and a few months working for the C4ITSC FSD (that’s “Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Information Technology Service Center, Field Services Division.” Whew! No wonder they like acronyms over there.) doing technical writing and editing of IT business process guides. Each guide was also published online on our intranet site which I helped design, build and maintain. All in all, I have to say, it was an interesting gig and I learned a bunch. I also met some great people.
But the uncertainty of contract work, particularly when the client is undergoing substantial reorganization, was hard to shake off. It seemed to me that there was a reasonable chance this project would not continue in the same way, if at all, after the task order expires this summer. So, when another opportunity suddenly appeared, with new challenges and new things to learn, and new interesting people to learn from, it just seemed like I had to go for it.
Writing can be solitary work. While there was interaction with the subject matter experts on the Coast Guard side, and some collaboration within our company team, there was plenty of time spent alone at the computer. And for most of this 15 months, we had a very quiet, mostly empty office near Jack London Square. It has only been in the last three and a half months that we moved in with the Coast Guard in the Federal Building in Oakland.
So, the weird part is how it already feels kind of sad to be leaving. People were pretty darn nice up there on the 7th floor. It really kind of feels like I’m leaving people I have known for much longer. I’ll just have to try and stay in touch and head down there for lunch every once in a while.
It was also really nice being a regular BART commuter, too. I hardly drove the ol’ Subaru at all for the last few months, and never to work. I almost felt grown up, wearing a button up shirt, carrying bag, and riding the commuter train. That’s pretty much over now. I plan on biking to the new job as religiously as I rode the BART to the last one.
So that’s that, the end of a chapter. Coming up is the beginning of the next.
Long Day
Shot at MacArthur BART while wait for Sarah to pick me up and go into the CIty.
Well, It’s been a long day. I think I’m too tired to write much tonight. But here’s some outlines.
I left for work about 8:15 and took the BART to my work at the Oakland Federal Building.
Two interesting things happened at work. First, one of the high-ranking respondents to a request for feedback on a draft business process guide I have been working on editing for months and months finally sent his response today, the very last day of the response period. He basically said this will not fly (contains unauthorized methods) and to stop the development process immediately. And that he’ll get back to us. Thanks.
The second thing that happened was that from my cubicle up on the seventh floor I heard what sounded like a car alarm going off down in the street below, along with some strange, pre-recorded muffled talking. After trying to ignore it for about 10 minutes by turning up the music in my earbuds, I finally got up to make a snide comment about it to a co-worker. After another five minutes of group snarkiness, the security officer came back through and told us to evacuate the building immediately. Oops. And don’t take the elevators. I walked down to about the fifth floor when I got word that the “drill” was over. Not sure but, I think we have failed the drill. Good thing it wasn’t one of those fertilizer bombs or I’d be in deep shit.
The day at the office was followed by two art openings. The first was a small show in a small cafe a block from my office in the street level shops of the Tribune building. I have one piece in the show. Thanks Sarah Filley! So, I walked over after work. I saw friend Paula Wirth, who curated the previous show I had some pieces in, and which led to one being in this one. And I had good time talking to Paula’s friend Will, a jazz vocalist and a photographer. After a couple glasses of champagne it was back on the BART to MacArthur Station where my Sarah picked me up to go into the City for more festivities.
The second art opening was friend Seth Dickerman’s show at Muse Gallery in SF. The show is great. I really like his dreamy layering of motion anyway, but here the technique is used with multiple panoramic-style shooting that is rendered with distinct frames or panels rather than stitched into a single frame. This gives it a motion-picture-film-strip quality. Nice. Afterward, a bunch of us went to dinner at a taqueria on Valencia in the Mission. Overstuffed, mildly buzzed, and exhausted, I arrived back home 14.5 hours after leaving this morning.
Now, I’m really too tired to write another word.
Update: and judging by the typos I had to correct this morning, I was too tired to write the words I did write.
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