blazin's Journal: Today is the first day of the rest of my career

Or at least that is to say, as of right now, or rather about 7 hours ago, I am unemployed. No longer (well almost no longer) will Mr. Lawrence Ellison be (electronically) signing my paychecks. Leaving today was quite hard. The hardest part was leaving behind the people I've met and worked with there.

Leaving the work behind wasn't that hard. I haven't really enjoyed my job that much in quite a few years, through multiple rounds of layoffs, two acquisitions, and doing the same things in the same chair in the same cube for six years. Leaving that for something wasn't hard, but leaving the people there was the really hard part. The people I worked with were great. People that I have worked with there that have moved on were great. I cannot think of anyone there who I worked with who was not very talented or funny or great to work with in some way.

In one hour and 7 minutes, my family and I will not be covered with medical, vision or dental insurance for the next 45 days. Fortunately, we don't have any appointments coming up and the doctors are working with us to give us 45 days or so of samples so we won't have to fill any prescriptions.

On Monday morning, I'll be flying out of Denver to San Diego to start work for Cricket Communications. I'll be back later in the week when they'll hopefully have an office or a cube available for me by then. I'll be doing PHP work and converting stuff from ASP.NET, Java, perl and ColdFusion to PHP for both internal and external stuff. Honestly, I am a little freaked out about it, but I am excited and it's the right time for me to take an opportunity like this. I think there's room for advancement, which I definitely didn't feel there was while working for Mr. E.

So I guess, W00T!

Re:

[account_deleted]

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Re:Wow...WOW

[nizo]

Congrats on escaping the snow infested wasteland! :-D (I had to reply under Sam's entry so he could enjoy my enthusiasm too)

Re:

[account_deleted]

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Re:Wow...WOW

[blazin]

I'm not actually going anywhere. Just a business trip to start my first week of work off.

Re:Wow...WOW

[KshGoddess]

If you have some time, go to Fry's ... either in San Marcos, or the San Diego one.

Tell the electronics I miss them.

Tell the sunshine and 72 degrees that they're on my mind.

Tell the real estate market to blow it out their ass. :D

Re:Wow...WOW

[blazin]

I initiated. I started looking probably about 2 months ago. I got an interview and an offer with beatport.com (located in Denver too), and even though that would have been a lot of fun, and it looked really cool (thing dot-com. Aeron chairs, ski pass as part of benefits, everyone has huge dual lcd monitors, etc) the pay wasn't there, so I declined. It would have been working for what I started at 6 years ago.

I am not leaving Denver. I am just in San Diego for the week. Or until Thursday night anyway.

Congratulations!

[dexterpexter]

I wish you the best.

Re:Congratulations!

[blazin]

Thank you. I am looking forward to it.

Congrats

[dead sun]

And don't forget to keep in touch with those people you enjoyed working with. You may need their expertise, contacts, or any number of things someday. Or vice versa.

Re:Congrats

[blazin]

I definitely plan on it. I sent out a big 'ol email on my last day to a lot of people (but I didn't do the standard email to [e-mail] email). And I went around to say bye to people too. I think I only missed two people with my email and I got someone to forward it on to them.

Good luck man!

[jawtheshark]

:-D I wish you all the best with your new career choice. :-D

Re:Good luck man!

[blazin]

Thank you.

Good luck with the new gig!

[winkydink]

I came very close to moving to Denver before taking my current job. It looks like a great city to live in.

Re:Good luck with the new gig!

[blazin]

Thank you very much. Denver is great. Not that I have much to compare it with, being a 6th generation native Coloradoan and all. I did live in Texas for a few years in the middle though.