There's a switch.

Usually, when my supervisor calls me into his office and asks me to close the door, it's either time for my semi-annual review (which it wasn't) or I'm in trouble for something.

Yesterday, it was to make me an offer.

Here's the situation. Our company has some fairly steady contracts, but the other work - the research and development stuff that I usually work on - is in a bit of a slump at the moment. Last week, our office manager announced his intention to have underemployed software developers (that's me, along with several others) assist in installations. He did not say, but it was implied, that this was his best attempt at avoiding some layoffs.

We actually have a whole staff devoted to installations. An installation usually involves going on travel (occasionally to cool places like Italy or Germany, but more often to podunk military installations in the middle of nowhere in whatever part of the United States is currently experiencing the most awful weather - Mississippi in July, or Alaska in January, for example) for two or three weeks, then coming back to the office for a couple of days, and then going on travel again.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would bitch and grouse a lot, but ultimately admit that it was probably better than being unemployed. But these are not ordinary circumstances, not for me. Luckily, I'm not the only one who knows that.

My supervisor rather delicately suggested during the weekly managers' meeting yesterday that perhaps a pregnant woman should neither be away from home that often, nor subjected to the occasionally heavy manual labor to which installations are subject. Astonishingly enough, the other managers agreed.

Furthermore, my supervisor noted, our QA manager has been doing the work of two people for almost a year now, and a lot of tasks are getting swept under the rug simply because he doesn't have time to do them. Wasn't it about time he got an assistant to replace the one who left?

That would be me. Or at least, that's what my supervisor suggested.

There's a lot to recommend the offer. It's a more secure position, and the opportunity for advancement would be better. The QA manager - who would become my supervisor - is a pretty nice guy, if a bit taciturn. I'd get my own office, and my (current) supervisor said he was fairly certain that it wouldn't be difficult to arrange for me to work from home occasionally after the baby's born.

And the downsides all come with caveats. I don't know a damned thing about QA, and I'd have to learn it all from scratch - but they'll send me to training. (Yes, that's travel, but only a week or two total, and it would be happening in the next month or so, before I'm too big and unwieldy.) The work is, from what little I do know, primarily documentation, which can be awfully boring - but then, I've been doing makework for most of the last year and more, which is also awfully boring, not to mention frustrating. Actually having work to do during the day will probably reduce the amount of time I have free to work on the novel - but I'm getting faster at the editing, so I don't think it will have too huge an overall effect.

My supervisor hinted pretty strongly that it would be a good career move and that no other such opportunities were forthcoming in the foreseeable future. I told him I'd take a couple of days to think about it and let him know.

I'll probably take it, but I want to second-guess myself a little longer. I have until tomorrow.

--Liz