…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…
