"Contracting" is another word for "catching a disease", right?

It’s been a weird couple of days at work. Yesterday I tried working from Crystal City, and I didn’t really get much done (which is par for the course for the last three months) but I felt like I could have been getting more done if I had been in the Rosslyn office, on the government network, able to poke my head in teammates’ cubicles, etc. So today I came to Rosslyn and it looks like I might be camping out here for a while, at least until we get through the project I was recently put in charge of (a server migration, if that means anything to you, and if it doesn’t, fear not, I won’t be getting into any of the technical details of it here).

My supervisor finally realized today that I would be haunting the Rosslyn office more now that I have my own building pass and network permissions and whatnot, so this morning he stopped by the cube where I’m squatting and he invited me to walk with him around the office so he could introduce me to other people who work there besides our specific team. And it sounds corny as hell but that really made a lot of my built-up anxiety go away. For the past three months I’ve been trying not to be too thrown off by the cognitive dissonance of knowing that I have a job and I’m getting paid and yet feeling like I’m not contributing to anything. Touring around the office doing grin-and-grips doesn’t necessarily make me feel like I’m contributing anything, either, but it at least made me feel like I was part of a team that might collectively make contributions. Or something like that. Also - Rosslyn office had Krispy Kremes for everyone today. Score.

Towards the end of the walkabout my supervisor introduced me to a fairly high-up government guy who was super-excited to hear that I was a web-database developer. Apparently if my supervisor can’t keep me busy enough, there’s some projects that are purely in the drawing board phase now which I might get conscripted into working on (read “working on” as “being solely responsible for everything from design to implementation because no one else really has a clue what that entails”). I’m not getting too excited yet, because I’ve heard that line before and seen it come to absolutely nothing, but again, it was nice to be able to imagine my job actually involving programming work again at some point.

Of course then I had to get down to the business of trying to coordinate this server migration as it comes down to the wire, and I finally got an answer to one of my questions, which was simply “how long can we expect the set-up to take?” I had predicted that the answer would be “about a week” and I had been telling my team as much and making contingency plans for holding everything together for a week of downtime. The real answer, as it turns out, is “4 – 6 weeks” and my reaction to that news can charitably be described as follows:


Don’t worry – I got over it. As the day went along I remembered that in the world of government support offices it takes a lot for people to get really worked up over things, and I don’t really care if this project takes six times longer than I expected, but I care if other people (like my supervisor and his superiors) are upset about it. But when I circulated the info it didn’t faze anyone. Nevertheless I am very much looking forward to the weekend and just not thinking about work for a couple of days.