23 January 2001
Damn, it's back. As I was drying off after my shower this morning, I got a strange cramp. It built slowly, smack in the center of my torso. By the time I'd walked back to the bed from the bathroom, it hurt so much I thought about taking the day off. But after about five minutes of laying down, it faded again, so I got up and got dressed.
All the way to work, I could feel it lurking behind my stomach, not actually hurting, but feeling a little tight, waiting for an excuse. Now that I'm actually at work, it's coming and going in waves, in a different spot each time - sometimes near my stomach, sometimes low in my abdomen. The pain isn't as bad as it was before, but it's more than a little disconcerting.
Well. I have to leave at 10:30 to go to the doctor to have my foot looked at. If it hasn't gone away by then, maybe I'll just go home afterwards.
No further news has been forthcoming about the situation at work. Everyone is practically frozen as we wait to see what will happen. There's been a lot of surfing to job listings, though.
So tell me this: You manufacture... Oh, it doesn't matter. Widgets. And when you send out your widgets, you put them in a plastic bag along with a "Certificate of Quality" which contains, among other things, the widget's serial number in a barcode.
Don't you think that, before you shipped out an order for ten thousand widgets, you'd check that barcode and make sure it could be read?
That's what I spent two and a half hours doing yesterday: trying to figure out why the barcode on the Certificate of Quality couldn't be read. I finally matched it to the barcode on the actual widget, only to discover that several lines - including the very necessary start/stop lines - had been chopped off the ends of the printed barcode.
Now I'm waiting for my supervisor to decide whether a) we'll have to open each bag to scan the barcode that's on the widget itself - a huge hiccup in what we'd hoped would be a fairly smooth process of packaging stuff to send to our customers - or b) to not bother collecting the widget information.
Personally, I don't care which it is, because I won't be the one doing the packaging. But since I'm writing the program that collects the packaging information, I need to know what they're doing, and soon.
The longer I think about it, the more appealing of an idea it is to quit my job, get my teacher's license, and become a teacher. I've wanted to teach since before college. I enjoyed teaching as a TA at Virginia Tech, and I enjoyed teaching at ECPI (though the hours and the commute both left something to be desired).
Parts of it would suck, I know. The pay, for one thing. I'd probably be reducing my paycheck by somewhere between a third and a half if I became a public school teacher, and the opportunities for any pay increases beyond basic standard-of-living would practically disappear. And I grew up in a house full of teachers - I'm fully aware of the political maneuvering and petty bickering that goes on.
But at least, as a teacher, I'd get to feel like just maybe I was doing something worthwhile. Something to help our future. As it is... My job is interesting, but hardly fulfilling.
And I'm starting to see a horizon where "fulfilling" matters.
It's not a hard decision, yet. I'm not turning in my resignation or anything. But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be the right decision for me, and the more I think that I don't want to be left behind just because the idea of change frightens me.
Word of the Day:
errant - wandering; straying outside accepted bounds; deviating from a standard
Currently Reading:
- The second of Dave Duncan's King's Daggers series, whatever its title is.
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan
- placemats