Tonight I headed over to play Whirlyball with some folks at work, as part of a holiday celebration. Given the large size of Sears, there’s a general lunch thing that happens for the downtown folks… but smaller teams tend to go and do their own thing separately.
And in fact, working late is somewhat discouraged here. I’ve heard several conversations just this week, where a senior manager was warning a co-worker about not making late nights a habit. And overall, it seems a good thing. I feel overly wired to not miss deadlines, no matter what… and work has been really good about trying to manage expectations, and shifting deadlines when necessary.
I lost a lot of time this weekend (and I mean a lot of time) to SimCity 2013. I was never very good at the game, but playing it again now so many years later… the same little attention to details sucked me in. I never know how much I liked simulations like this, as it’s one part terrarium and one part god complex, I suppose.
So one of the less glamorous tasks associated with my new job is pager duty. Among the various other FEDs (Front End Developers), we each take on the pager for a week at a time. The pager receives emails that get sent out to a support email address, and we’re basically “on-call” to jump in, should anything front-end related arise.
I’ll be working as a FED (Front End Developer), which… I’ll be honest, is still a fairly daunting title to me. Compared to a lot of friends, I still feel very much like a dabbler. But I’ve gotten a great deal of experience these last few months, and I’m excited to take on this new job. In terms of the work I’ve done and the work I’ll be doing, I’m going to be getting a great deal of practice – and getting a lot of opportunities to learn.
So at work, there are two large coffee carafes – one containing Starbucks coffee, and one containing Folgers. Both taste terrible, partly due to the fact that the grounds are all pre-packaged and partly due to the fact that the containers likely haven’t been cleaned between each use. But hey, it’s hot. And it’s free. And I’m trying to save money. And somewhere, beyond the awful burnt taste is a modicum of caffeine.
As it is in most offices across the world, the bane of the shared kitchen is the person who taps the coffee and leaves refilling it to the next guy. Large or small, all companies have these guys.
It’s a funny thing: I used to drive up to Barrington all the time, for the first job I landed out of grad school. For a solid two years, I’d take the Roselle Road exit, and drove by this castle wondering what the inside was like… and today, finally, I got to find out.
Though I’ve had a chance to work within several different sites, the majority of the work that I do most days involves Kmart. And it so happens that today, I got wind of a pretty funny commercial that Kmart just launched.
Two coworkers (Alex and our boss Ann) got into a discussion a few weeks ago about who could consume the most milk. They went back and forth a few times, with the subject matter shifting from milk to heavy cream to butter. I think they landed on Half and Half, but I’m not 100% on this.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed for a web developer position with Sears. And I’m happy to say that I start work on tomorrow – Monday morning.
I’ll be honest – I’m nervous. I’ve been away from coding for a while now, so there’s a part of me that’s a little overwhelmed at how much there is to learn, and how much I feel I need to learn. But there’s another part of me that’s pretty excited – to be in an environment where I’ll be working again, actually rolling up my sleeves, getting my hands dirty and making things. It’s daunting and exciting, in equal measure to me.