Transitions

I've been away from work for two weeks, the longest single vacation I've taken in years, possibly ever.

I've been checking up on office email via my mobile from time to time, sometimes to see if there's any emergency which concerns me, but mostly to trim out the crap so I'm not overwhelmed with 1500 emails the moment I step back into work. I dislike surprises so I wanted to keep abreast of any developments. A lot of peace of mind can be bought for only ten minutes per day.

So far today, I've just been taking care of some outstanding tickets and minor issues which have been ignored in my absence. There is one server issue which has been generating an email message every two minutes for a week now... I'm unsure how that one was ignored all this time but I'll have that fixed shortly.

The HR folks have been busy. The official unlimited vacation policy is now in place, along with the steps for implementation on Sept 15, 2017. To clean up the bank of outstanding vacation days before that start date, the firm is officially shutting down for the week of Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas this year, and the week of Labour Day next year. That wipes out 15 vacation days, whether I want to or not.

I have no concerns though about the compelled vacation. Even after taking two weeks off, I have eight vacation days left in the bank. And with my seniority, I get another 20 vacation days before the policy starts. Even with the forced burn, I'll still have 13 vacation days leftover. Further bonus: the company shutdown days are exactly the date ranges I was planing for anyway.

Since my extra vacation days won't be cashed out, I'll find other uses. I still need to set aside days for my grandmother's upcoming 90th birthday in April, 2017, as well as for the IAGSDC convention in Palm Springs around July 4, 2017.

Transitions, Part II

In various telephone calls today with people at our San Francisco mothership, I have learned that two more senior staff from our Car Service division in Secaucus, NJ, have left the firm. By default, my team is now caring for their servers & services, although at this moment, I don't even have login credentials for most of their machines, not to mention an inventory. This is a sad and dangerous situation.

On the good side, my boss is going through the formality of interviewing a candidate for the recently departed Car Service director. It's a guy that the boss has already worked with, and with whom I worked with on a recent visit to California. If we can make him an offer, I will be a very, very happy camper.

In a vastly bigger bit of news, the board of directors has approved a budget of $1.2 million for support & upgrades of our data center facilities. At long last, we have approval to proceed with the hardware refresh in the data center where I work, after nearly a year of false starts. The boss is making some calls to confirm numbers and then we start pushing out the purchase orders, probably before the end of this week. My October is going to be very, very busy but it will be doing the work I love.