Walls

The third bedroom/spare room/study/guest room in the new house shares a wall with the baby’s room, which means that for the past several nights, (coinciding with Very Little Bro’s visit) my wife and I have been acutely aware of our little guy’s difficulties in sleeping through the night. Just when we had reached the point of building a critical mass of steel in our respective spines, allowing us to resist the first ten or fifteen minutes of wee-hours wailing in hopes that the mite would comfort himself back to sleep, we found ourselves with a much lower tolerance for caterwauling out of deference to Very Little Bro. We can stomach being awakened, lying awake for a fairly painful while, and generally enduring unpleasantness because it is ostensibly in the best long-term interests of our progeny and, by extension, ourselves. That’s just part of the package deal of parenting. But houseguests shouldn’t have to walk that road with us, so the past few nights have seen much quicker response time and a rush down the path of least resistance to restore the quiet of the house. My wife, of course, has been doing the lioness’s share, and we’ve come to an understanding that I’m not to feel bad about this. (Which of course means I do feel bad about it but I don’t brood about how bad I feel about it – marriage is all about compromise.)

Very Little Bro is departing northward today, so if the past is any guide, tonight the baby will doubtless enjoy twelve hours of sleep uninterrupted by a single chirrup of discontent.

Meanwhile, my own discontent at work now stems from the fact that I am done with my major project and am left once again with very little to do. The completion of the server transition was met with very little fanfare, but I knew all along that’s how it would go; success, for this project, would be best achieved if no one noticed that anything had changed. It wasn’t an addition of new functionality or a shiny visual redesign. No user should be aware of the essentially invisible service of hosting, so the non-event nature of reaching the finish line is, in its own way, a testament to my awesomeness. It also, however, takes away any day-to-day need for me to be in the government office every day, since I’m not fussing with the server network which is only accessible from the inside. Going forward I should be able to work remotely and only come into the office when I have finished building new code or repairing old code and need to install it.

All well and good, but where will this remote work be done? Back in the summer I spent most of my time at a corporate office in Crystal City, where space was made for me on a very (assumed at the time) temporary basis in the I.T. Help Desk room. That worked, but was also kind of a drag, because if I wasn’t being mistaken for Help Desk Support myself I was almost constantly distracted by people wandering in and out of the office looking for ways to circumvent the company e-mail attachment size restrictions or begging to have their lifeless laptop miraculously resuscitated, or just the actual I.T. Help Desk guys sitting around bullshitting with each other (which, I hasten to add, I do not begrudge them in the slightest – map someone’s connection to a new printer in five minutes and then spend an hour and a half talking about Halo 3 until the next pseudo-emergency erupts, that’s your prerogative; I’m just saying it’s hard to work on utterly unrelated tasks in the same room as that). On top of those specific grousings, add the fact that it’s somewhat dispiriting to work at a blank desk and be told not to get attached to it. So while I believe (although I have not yet confirmed) that my loaner laptop is still waiting for me at that beat-up desk in the corner of the Help Desk room, and I could very well go back to Crystal City, the truth is I don’t want to.


On the other hand, a vague plan was formulated (over my head) to allow me to do my offsite work at a different corporate office in Fairfax. Formerly there were two corporate buildings on the same street, but the workforce is being consolidated into one building in a major re-arranging, and apparently this represents the perfect opportunity to set me up in a more or less permanent environment, a desk that’s not just free for me to use temporarily but really (in as much real sense as the word can carry in the work-for-hire mega-corporation modern economy sense) mine. Thing is, the big Fairfax office building consolidation has not gone down yet, as far as I know, nor do I know when exactly it will be completed, other than “sometime in January.” And even that timeframe must be heavily caveated with maybes.

I’d be happy to stay here in Rosslyn until the path to Fairfax was clear, but that’s not so simple, either. The agreement between the government and my employer is fairly explicit about my role on the team assigned to do the contracted work, and it spells out that I am supposed to spend most of my time offsite. So it’s not just allowed for me to work remotely, it’s required unless there’s good reason for me to be here. I had a very good reason while the transition project was ongoing, but now I don’t. And yet I keep showing up here in Rosslyn every day, partly to avoid Crystal City and partly because there are some non-justifying but still compelling loose ends here which are easier to sort out in person. I expect my contracting supervisor at any minute now to give me a direct order along the lines of “Stop coming to Rosslyn,” but it hasn’t happened yet. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I can run out the January clock.