because not enough websites start with the letter “Z”
Posted in life on Apr 18th, 2008
There are any number of differences between working as a consultant and working as an employee. And there are some similarities. Today I ran across an unexpected similarity. The company I work for now, as an employee, has undergone significant growth in the past couple of years and they are going through all the growing [...]
Posted in life on Apr 14th, 2008
After thirty-one years of getting paper paychecks or pay stubs, tomorrow will mark the first occasion of my receiving an electronic pay statement. My employer, in an effort to avoid paying the increased mass mailing postage rate, has decided to stop mailing associates, who use direct deposit, pay stubs. Over the course of a year [...]
The company I work for has two buildings in downtown Kansas City. The primary location has its own underground garage with two levels of parking for those associates who work there. The garage isn’t large enough to accommodate everyone, so some associates are given a leased space in the public garage across the street. The [...]
A year ago today I started my current job. For the first time in a seven years I was a full-time employee rather than a consultant, and for the first time in a decade I was changing jobs without moving cross-country in the process. It has been an interesting first year. The project I joined [...]
Posted in life on Dec 4th, 2007
My employer has a parking garage under the main building for associates. Unfortunately the company has grown so much in the past couple of years that there is no long sufficient room for everyone to park in this facility. My employer’s parent company has a number of real estate holdings in the downtown area, and [...]
Like all jobs (or most, anyway) mine came with a set of benefits, including two shiny floating holidays. The parent company observes all the banking holidays each year, while my employer observes all but two. To balance this inequity, we get two floating holidays each year. I used one of mine way back last spring. [...]
Posted in life on Nov 20th, 2007
We are nearing the end of the calendar year and that means only one thing. That’s right, annual employment evaluations. Joyous tidings to us all. For the first time in about eight years I’m employed in a situation where annual evaluations are actually performed. What’s more, there is a process to follow, software to be [...]
Posted in life on Jun 21st, 2007
The cubical I occupy at work is fairly nice as cubes go, it even comes with a small built-in whiteboard. The whiteboard is maybe 18 inches tall and 40 inches long. I had to request a set of dry erase markers and an eraser, but that was easily accomplished in a couple of days. The [...]
Posted in life on Apr 24th, 2007
The move to a new office building seems to have gone very smoothly. All of my office items where here waiting for me upon my arrival Monday, and better still, none were broken or damaged. There was network connectivity and my phone worked. Almost anti-climatic after the several weeks of build up. The new space [...]
In the winter of 1979 I talked my way into a community college course on COBOL. At the time I was a senior in high school and, having had the Basic programming course the high school offered I was hungry for more. The father of one of my friends was teaching a course in COBOL [...]