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Today marked the first day of our JavaScript training. The good news is that it’s challenging and interesting, and our instructor for this training phase is great. The bad news: I can’t remember whole chunks of high school math. It’s just gone right out of the window. The area of a circle? Damned if I know. Multiplication tables? I only remember up to 10 x 10–I’m not sure I ever got beyond that. Calculations to get remainders??? Exponents? Hahahahahah!!! One would never know that, once upon a time, math in any form was my best subject.

The other major negative—we’ve started “working together” on solving problems. I have a sordid confession…I’m an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs scale, with the “I” being practically off the chart. They used to put on my first grade report card, “Doesn’t play well with others.” Don’t get me wrong…now that I’m an adult, I do understand the reality that no one exists in a bubble, and we all need each other (you can start singing “Kumbaya” any time now), and that one does need to work with people, no matter what one does do for a living. However, working with others has always been a challenge for me, even under the best of conditions. Throw in attempting to understand a new programming language and desperately trying to recall PEMDAS and square roots, and you have the recipe for disaster. My group and I did muddle through, despite my constant interjections of, “but this is the way you’re SUPPOSED to do it!” (that pesky “J” part of INFJ)…and then finding out that NO…I was quite wrong in certain instances.

I know from past experience in working on teams, that the beginning is going to be ugly; but I’ll eventually adapt, once I get used to working with my group members.

This is going to be a long week…and I have a feeling I’m going to be learning much more than just JavaScript.

I’m happy to say I’ve survived the first week of Coding Bootcamp! As my mother would have said, it was an ugly business, but clean living prevailed!

I’m also happy to report that our instructor approved the proposal for my project website. This is going to be our first major project. We have to create a multi-page website that’s functional (or as functional as it can be without JavaScript), correctly coded, correctly formatted, unique, impressive, and checked into Git with meaningful notes–all due by next Thursday. Oh, and this project will determine if we can continue on with the Code Academy or be booted back to our original jobs…not that there is any pressure…

Needless to say, my project website is going to be about knitting…and crocheting…and anything yarn-related. I’m thinking I’d like the main gist of the site to be a blog, where I can entertain people with my funny knitting and crocheting adventures (stop laughing…this is indeed a thing!). We need to do an “About Me” page, a login page, a registration page, and a main user interaction page. I’m planning to make the user interaction page a place where people can buy my patterns. Okay…I have exactly TWO patterns that anyone might be interested in buying, and one that’s still a scratched-up mess on a piece of paper, but the point is to make the page, so I’m going to muddle along with this the best I can.

Looks like I’m going to be busy over the weekend…

The fact that it’s 10 p.m. and I’m still wearing my work ID badge should tell you everything you need to know about my day…

As I’m sitting here struggling and banging my head on my desk over my Code Bootcamp homework that involves HTML and tables, and forms, and hopefully remembering my Git commands so that I don’t somehow hose my master repo AGAIN–here are the following things I’ve discovered that I no longer give a rat’s ass about:

• • Cute Facebook Posts
  • Anything currently trending on Twitter
  • The news
  • People’s needless dramas
  • Anything adorable involving anyone’s child or pet.
  • Whatever it is people watched on TV last night.

I STILL haven’t looked at my actual work email yet today.  The company could have been sold to China for all I know.  Thankfully, no one has been clamoring for my help on anything in relation to my old job.  I can’t decide if I’m happy about this or deeply disappointed.

UPDATE…OMG…I DID IT!!!  I managed to make it through all my homework!  What a relief!  

Now I have to get to bed so that I can go through this all over again tomorrow…somehow, getting ready for bed seems exhausting… 

…except that everyone in my old life has my cellphone number.

Today marked my last workday as a business analyst. I said goodbye to my boss, with the understanding that, hopefully, I’ll be back in the same department as a developer. I said goodbye to my coworkers, who are happy for me–including all the developers, who all seem pleased that I am now going to be joining their ranks in the Realm of Nerdom.

I think my replacement is good to go with the KT. If not, I’ve given him a lot of people to tap for information. He’s going to have to make do, as I’ve been told that, going forward, I am to be fully concentrating on Coding Bootcamp.

That seems foreign, somehow. Any other time I’ve been away from a job for any length of time, I’ve been bombarded by calls, texts, and emails from coworkers who seemingly couldn’t type a sentence of requirements, hold a meeting, run a SQL query, or look up one reference in my absence.

Before you get incensed at my “ego,” I’m not speaking just about myself. According to an informal survey I’ve taken of my friends and acquaintances, this is the way it is with ALL our jobs. Whether you work in Corporate America, the corner store, a hospital, or as a chef in a restaurant, employers and employees–now emboldened by the wonderful world of texting and email–can follow you EVERYWHERE when you have time away. Even if you leave the state and change your name, they still seem to find you.

It was bad enough in the days when they could just call you. In Cape Cod on vacation one year, I emerged naked from the shower, dripping shampoo and soap, because my coworker (who had the number of my vacation cottage) called to ask why a certain mainframe job failed. Before you ask WHY she had the landline number to my cottage…well, it was actually her family’s cottage. The deal was that I got to stay there for free off-season, with the only payment being that I would clean the place to get it ready for the paying renters the following week. The other unforeseen payment turned out to be having to be on-call for any and every hiccup in our daily processes, whether this be a man-made or machine-made disaster.

So, it’s going to be interesting to see if I can really manage to fully take the plunge into my new adventure at Code Academy without a whole host of texts, IMs, emails, voicemails, and calls creeping in like a bad rash…