Has it really been over half a month since my last post?

Guess it really doesn't matter, as I have yet to "go public" with the notion that I've joined the Blog Generation. Part of this seems like an exercise in futility. I've never been much for journaling, although dog knows that I've tried.

Another part of my acknowledges that I've been held in the tenterhooks of ennui. The onset was somewhere around the month before I got laid off from my last gig at Worldcom. I'd come into work, post idly on People's Forum for about 7 hours, do whatever minimal tasks I had been given, and would go home before rush hour traffic kicked in. Believe it or not, this is an almost acceptable state of affairs around that office.

You wouldn't think Nashville would have much of a problem with traversing sundry A to B routes, but alas, much time is wasted on the highways and byways. I don't know if this is a particular southern phenomenon, but I have noticed that most people driving around here tend to take the most direct route, even if it means that they have to wait through multi-block queues of congestion. In rain, all bets are off. Not a single route, beaten or unbeaten, moves at more than a glacial tick. In snow? Forget it.

Anyway -- that tangent is merely to illustrate the frustration that had become my existence at my "previous employer." I'll do my best to be fair, as it is my wont not to burn bridges whenever possible. The caveat here is two-fold: (1) The WCOM situation was a clusterfuck from the moment John Sidgemore pledged to "enter a new chapter in the company's history" -- to which my [prescient] smart-ass quip was, "Yeah, Chapter 11;" and (2) the business re-alignment process pretty much amounted to an ice floe for my figurative Eskimo (read: livelihood) to be placed upon. I had no idea that the boot would come at the point that it did, but -- I admit -- I was all about "working smarter, not harder." And as many of my netizen counterparts can testify, I spent an inordinate amount of time in community talkin' shit with other music obsessives. I have no idea if that behavior was a variable in the equation "Work + Worldcom <> Andy," but given what I knew about how I conducted myself during business hours, and given that I was assigned to a couple of high-penetration/low-uplift accounts, I figure that if I'm a manager being given a headcount number, I might make the same determination.

Someone tell me if I sound like a captive...?

I've struggled with the notion of career for nearly as long as I've been dancing the information technology rag. I felt, for a long time, that there was something else that I "should be doing." However, what that was? Open question. I would ask other people, "Hey, what is it that you think I should be doing?" This got a few quizzical glances in return, and the odd bit of practical advice. At some point, though, I figured out a couple of things. First, I can do this work fairly well, and fairly easily. Second, the money is really good. Third, when things are going well, I enjoy the work, and I don't have many complaints. The complaints I do have amount to things that everyone (that I know) (with a conscience) (working for a living) (that has a low b.s. tolerance) finds strugglesome. Bureaucracy, inanity, rear-echelon incompetence, yadda yadda. We all know the drill. So, the key? Find a gig where things are going well.

I may have found that opportunity.

I had my third interview today at Bell South...