Time over a promotion

I didn't get the new job I applied for last month in NYC and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand I wouldn't have minded a challenge in an exciting work environment again, the other hand looks at our crazy home life the last few months and realizes that it is best if my time reminds flexible for the next six months or so as my wife continues to heal from her lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation from her breast cancer surgery in June.  While it is nice I don't have to eliminate our nice leisurely before school mornings I am a bit concerned what this does to my long term career plans as more and more of my position's duties, which are highly skilled, are getting shipped overseas.

I hadn't planned on interviewing for a new position last month, although  my wife and I had been talking about both of us looking for new opportunities in the spring, once she was healed. But sometimes opportunities just happen. The position is a managerial one in a fairly new division of my company. I have been working with them as borrowed talent from before the days that division officially started up and am familiar with the work and the players involved. The previous manager retired and, when her job was posted, I debated about applying for it, leaning against it as I wasn't sure this was the right time for our family. I worried about time, time away from caring for the children and what that added time restraint would do to both my wife's and mine health (less gym time for both plus her ingoing cancer treatments). And I didn't want to commute to Manhattan five days a week again, which is what was originally required.

But then they reached out to me, which was flattering, so I decided to apply. And I am glad I did. It has been a long time since I was excited to go to work and, after interviewing with the higher ups, I saw this may be an opportunity to get excited again.  Career wise, assuming I stay in the company and I and the initiative succeeded, it would be an excellent long term move. Working at the company's headquarters in NYC, not a pleasant semi-back office in the suburbs, would have made me more visible. However, there were personal time issues I had concerns with. 

Some of my fears about time constraints probably wouldn't mattered as much as they could have. On the day of the interview I left the office at 6:15P and was walking in my door by 7:45P. This may sound lousy to most of the country, but is actually almost decent for those commuting from Manhattan. With evening activities keeping my wife and children out of the house until the 7 o'clock hour anyway many evenings, coming home close to 8PM is not as bad as it was when the children were younger and required more hands on dealings (and I will still be able to pick up the slack two evenings a week). Add in 20-30 minutes on the treadmill in the morning and evening and I could have made it work.

But, I still worried what this would mean for my family. My wife has finally admitted how much all the flexibility my current job allows me in taking care of the children, food shopping, taking care of the pets, doing laundry and, just in general, taking care of her in little ways, has helped her get through this. She has time to rest, though never enough, and time to go to the gym. Because I have time to cook, she always has a healthy meal waiting for her to be warmed up when she gets home from her evening gym classes (which she has time to take as I can drive the kids around in the evenings. Though my wife was able to leave work on time, get the kids from their aftercare programs at their schools and still make a family spin class at 5:30P at the Y, while I was in the NYC office until 6:15P, that was at the start of her paclitaxel, treatment and the wear on her body is cumulative. She might have had problems with that by mid-November when I would started in the new position. Still, these short term positives could be meaningless if my job is eliminated in a few years and my resume doesn't have a managerial position in it.

As to the person who got the position, I feel they made a good choice. The person is a friend of mine who had been working on this new initiative for about as long as I. His skills set was very similar and, when he told me he had applied, I thought that this was the one person who could beat me out. Still, the job may have almost been mine anyway. They low balled him on salary, which my company does, sticking to the typical raise they offer to promoted employees, before they upped their offer (they wanted to give a 10% raise calculated from his base pay, he successfully got them to include the OT with the base pay and up it from there -- which still would not be enough in my view).

However, there are some things money and a more exciting work life can't buy -- time to care for my family and time to take care of me. If I'd have been promoted I would have had to head to NJ Transit before the school bus came (unlike now where, even on non-telecommute days, I am home until the bus comes). For our youngest child, this would have meant going to a neighbor's before school or being enrolled in a before school child care program, for our older child, this would have meant being a latch key kid (he vetoed going to a neighbor's like a younger child). Whereas I can currently help my wife get the children fed and out the door, much more of this would have fallen back on her. As to me, I would have had give up a huge portion of my exercise time. I recently took off a large amount of weight through diet and exercise and wondered how having less time to exercise and cook properly would affect that. Now I still get to hit the gym at 6AM and be home in time to see the children off to school and let the healthy foods cook in the slow cooker while I work in the other room.  Things a job in Manhattan would have prevented.

So while I may not have won this day, the interviews made me realize that while I was on the fence about taking the position, I am ready move on to something more challenging closer to home, where I can have the best of both a challenging position and a home life. While the timing is not right now, I want something that will knock me out of my comfort zone for some time as I've discovered that I usually have the ability to get done what needs to get done. It is almost time to move onto the next stage.

Almost made the IT guy cry

My office, in acknowledgment that we work differently these days, is shrinking our physical office space. Back in the day, this meant office folks being downgraded to the cube farm, but it means something else these days. Today (Friday), in our office of about 120 people, perhaps 40 or 50 people will be physically in the office. The rest will be telecommuting or vacationing. Physical attendance is a little better during the rest of the week, but almost all of us telecommute at least once a week, sometimes more. This has led to the office looking quite deserted many days so, in an effort to make the office seem more populated, and not to mention save money on rent and utilities, my office is reducing our office space. For some this has meant going from an office to a cube, for others this has meant office sharing. I fall in the later category.

This is not as bad as it seems. I have a laptop and telecommute several times a week. My office mate also telecommutes several times a week, but still has a desktop at work. This is not a major hassle as we usually are not in on the same days and we have a virtual private network (VPN) to log in on home. For me, with the laptop, I use my VPN token on the laptop from my home and start typing away. For my co-worker, she leaves her pc on at work and uses a virtual desktop from home which allows to be almost at work from home, at least electronically (the downside of this is her desktop at work takes up limited desk space). Through a careful dance around school and camp schedules, we've reached an equilibrium where we both have our own office on certain days of the week. The only days we have scheduling problems are days we're both in for our bi-monthly department meetings. Again, not a major hassle as laptops travel. However, since I'm the only one with a laptop, currently, I'm the traveling man. We have extra spaces, either hotel cubes for visitors or offices of people on vacation who currently have laptops that I can plug my machine into. At the moment, this is limited to a small, but growing percentage of office space as people in my position get converted from desktop machines to laptops. Yesterday was my office mate's turn.

My office mate is, admittedly, not the most tech savy person. Yesterday, when I walked into our shared office to file some paperwork (I'm still waiting for the truly virtual office) I saw the IT guy at her desktop, preparing her computer to be copied to her new laptop. The IT guy is a 40 something, friendly outgoing guy. You know the type, a hard worker who is also quick with a joke. His mental presence usually outshines his physical presence. Anyway, my co-worker was asking him how she would connect at home. You see, currently at home she has her home computer and uses that to log onto the system. The nice folks from FIOS hooked up her machine, she connected to the internet (and our network) and that was that.

So, in an effort to help her out, the IT guy first asked her what equipment she had at home. A thin, shiny black box. Oh a modem? No, they called it something else. A cable box? No, something else. Oh well, well you're going to need a router. A router, that's it! Well, the laptops have WiFi capability. Is the router wireless? I don't know. Can you connect with an ethernet cable. What's that?

At that point, I left my office. I didn't actually see the IT guy cry, but he sure looked deflated. Maybe he was just tired as he has been rewiring and remapping many employees for the last month as we downsized our space. Maybe he was just having a bad afternoon. Anyway, as I reached back to close the door, I looked back and saw the back of the seemingly shrunken IT guy. Though he didn't say it verbally, I saw him slowly shaking his head as his whole body seemed to let out one long "sigh." As I left, I got the feeling this wasn't the first time this happened to him. As for my co-worker, next week should be quite interesting.