End of the Year wrapup

A lot of stuff has happened this year. I’ve gone from single, to in a relationship, to single again. I’ve worked on some really great ideas, though most of them haven’t really taken shape. I’ve gotten really close to getting violent at work (ok, not really, but i wished i could get violent at work :P). All those things seemed to climax into the events that have occurred in the last few weeks.

I’ll start with a quick recap of my previous post. Zach and I have been job hunting for the last few months, since the end of September/beginning of October. We’d even enlisted the service of some recruiting firms — TEK Systems being one of them. We had some meeting with our recruiting representative — or whatever they’re officially called — and talked about why we wanted to leave our current job, what we’re looking for in other places of employment, what kind of qualifications we have, etc, etc. Along with that we’d also put our resume’s up on job searching sites like Monster and Dice, and we even applied at some local positions online. That choice bared fruit in what happened next. iPay Technologies got in contact with both of us, as we’d both applied for some of the positions they had posted. We had our phone screenings, we even got interviews! Meanwhile back at work, nothing seemed to change. We’d told our management months before that we were job hunting, and now we’d told them we were interviewing with a company. They still didn’t seem to be doing anything — like collecting resumes or putting feelers out.

About a week later, Zach and I had another phone interview with someone else from iPay, and the next day there was an offer letter in our inbox. At first we thought the amount they were offering was a monthly salary until Zach noticed it was bi-weekly! So needless to say, we told our boss that we’d both found a new job, and we’d be starting there at the beginning of January. We then accepted the offer letters. Now is when things start getting interesting.  We told our bosses that we’d go through all our projects and document everything and write up abstracts on the projects themselves — we did this not because we were told to, but because it was the right thing to do — and we’d even screen any people they found as possible candidates. All these actions were done out of kindness and professionalism.

One Friday Zach calls me to tell me what he’s just overheard, management talking about how horrible we were, how none of our projects ever worked how they wanted, how all the reports were always wrong, how apparently we were just big pieces of shit! Even though it was Zach telling me this, I could feel that flame of anger building inside of me. We were going to help these people out, find them replacements for our positions, and they’re going to stab us in the back? In the big picture i shouldn’t really care, as i have a new job already lined up, and they’re expecting me after the new year. But just to hear what people really think of us after working with them for almost three years.. it just hurts. I thought some of those people were good colleagues if not friends. So in response to that action, i moved my final day of work up to yesterday. I still did everything else I’d promised, documenting code, writing overviews of our projects, going over submitted resumes. But i wasn’t going to work there for another few weeks in that kind of environment. I also wanted to cash out all my vacation time in one paycheck, heh. That’s almost 2 1/2 weeks of pay on top of my week of pay this week. Should be a nice paycheck indeed.

Now i can’t wait until my first day at my new job. I’m kind of anxious and nervous, but i think it will be a big step in the right direction for my career.