10 Years and Counting

Yesterday, I attended a lunch with my new boss to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of me joining the staff here at the mighty U. The lunch was good, and my boss and his other 10-year employee were good company, as were the other folks in attendance. I got a little certificate, and there's a catelog I can pick a gift from. Some of them are even kind of cool.

I really have no complaints with my employer (knock on wood). I took a below-entry-level job shuffling papers to get my foot in the door. 2 years and some learning later, I got a 28% raise (I am told, the biggest in the organization's history, %-wise), and changed jobs. I was a so-so employee for the first 2-3 years I was here. Competent, but not outstanding, and, frankly, a little too contentious. One boss and friend once said, "Some people don't suffer fools lightly. You just don't suffer them at all."

In retrospect, I was lucky that people put up with me some days. I owe them, and a string of peers that trained me on anything and everything.

I was handed some assignments that sucked. Running labs for people that were sometimes grateful, sometimes just jerks, but always under a deadline, was stressful. I also got to see some really amazing projects and talk to some of the world's leading experts in their fields. The better I got, the cooler the projects were, and the more the job was something besides just a paycheck. I actually started to do things that made my colleagues' lives easier. I got over the fear of getting attatched to people and projects, or at least, put it aside long enough to do a better job for them. I started seeing it as my job to not only suffer fools, but to protect them. Turns out that some fools are just nice people that don't know the same things as I know. Who'd have guessed?

One of my (many) mangers asked me, Where do you see yourself in a year? Five years? Ten years? I figured, it was one of those "we want to appear warm and fuzzy" things that employers do sometimes. "Probably here; published and writing and probably not here; and established as an author and anywhere but here," were what my answers boiled down to.

Well, a year later I was better at my job, five years later I was really good at what I do and enjoying it. I write, and will continue to write. Someday I may bother to try to get published, or maybe I'll just leave a DVD to my kids and tell them, "See what you can get for this when I'm dead." I may do a Masters or a Doctorate degree. I may not. Hard to say what I'll want to be when I grow up.

I can tell you for certain, though, I won't regret the ten years I spent here, or the people I spent them with.