HDIF about where your career right now and what you would like to do with the rest of your life? DYFF.

Dear LORD:

Thank you that I have a good paying job that requires very little effort on my part and imposes a modest level of stress on my life. Please help me maintain an attitude of gratitude, submission and contentment with respect to this job. Show me what it is you want for me to do with the rest of my life. Amen!

Dearest Ruth:

Your MEQ today was noticing that I am doing a good job on picking up the kitchen. Encouraging words like that go a long way in helping me to feel loved by you. I am discovering that my love language is very much involved with words of affirmation. I appreciate and love your encouraging and supporting words.

The way I feel about my job right now is bored. The way I feel about what I want to do with the rest of my life is complicated, a stew of emotions.

Looking first at EMC. One the one hand, this job requires very little effort on my part. I have a team which basically does it for me. I am not sure how long this will last, but right now that is a very sweet thing. Today was typical. I was able to go to the 9 a.m. yoga class, come home and do some work. Later, I took a nap for about an hour. Then I did some more work. They were thrilled. After you got home, I knocked off and you and I have been "being together" ever since.

Pretty sweet for a Monday.

Compare that to NetApp where I was expected to be in the office everyday. I even got lectured by Rich Clifton about my "attendance record". He wanted me to "set an example". And all that happy horseshit. Chad on the other hand told me from the get-go that I could work from home every day as far as he was concerned. I have never been bothered about that stuff since Mike Wytenus exited the scene.

Certainly with Pat Healy away in Cork, I have no adult supervision. Once in a while I get some grumbling from folks who are obviously jealous, but that's it.

On the other hand this job is booooooorrrrrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnngggggg!!!! I have gotten so burned out on technology. I have been doing it for too long. This is my twentieth year in this business. I need to do something else.

Certainly that's the long term plan. I would love dearly to be in some form of business with you. But we need to get through our immediate financial issues before that can become a reality. So I need to cool my jets. I am trying to be as patient as I can with remaining at EMC for now and putting in my time, doing the work quarter by quarter, taking my fat salary and coming home to you and the kids.

If the travel was to ramp up (fortunately Pat is protecting me on that), then this job could go south really fast. But I don't see that happening anytime soon. As long as I am working for Pat I suspect that I will have about 1 trip per month, with you being able to come with on at least one trip in three. That means we are only apart two weeks per quarter, which is manageable. Painful for both of us, but still manageable.

It will rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyy be sweet for us to be in California week after next. Oh! Oh! Oh! How I am looking forward to that. Yay!

In terms of EMC and my present job then, bored would be the word. It feels exactly like you are in an airport in another city somewhere and you have a really long connection. Nothing is wrong really, no delays or such. You simply got a bad deal when you booked the flight and now you have to sit on your butt and do nothing for several many hours watching the hands on the clock turn. You are stuck and you are simply going to be bored. Get used to it.

It is like the color battleship grey. A dull, lifeless color. Completely devoid of anything interesting. I should be engaging in certification study for example, but so far I have not been able to gin that up. (Maybe yoga will help with this. I know it is helping me with disciplined behavior generally.)

So bottom line on the rest of my life part of the question is I suppose the strongest feeling would be thwarted. Kind of like you have a really, really good word in Scrabble and you know that if you could just get it on the board you would nail this guy to the wall. But you have no place to play it and the board is really tight and tied up. You are like "shoot!" "dang!" "crap!" and can't seem to figure out a way to get that word out there. It is like that. Another picture is that it feels like I am groping around, arms outstretched, trying to find the door to the bathroom in the middle of the night. All the while I really, really have to pee.

What I am doing in the meantime is addressing my health concerns, learning as much as I can about things like yoga, vegan dieting, different types of alternative health techniques, and the like. I am in search of a new opportunity. In a similar way to the way that technology transformed my life in the 80s, I am looking for a way for the new technologies that are emerging now (relating to things like alternative health and green, sustainable, healthy diet) to transform my life and make a way for us to earn an income.

I do not know how this will turn out. That is frustrating and exciting at the same time. It promises to be a bit of a ride. Let's hang on and see where this takes us!

Love,
Me