Life is rather definitely slower here at NewJob than at OldJob. At OldJob I was hourly instead of salaried. That by itself is, in this case, a better thing when it comes to de-stressing. So far the instances where I've put in 'unpaid overtime' have been balanced out by 'unofficial comp-time'. This is not always the case for salaried people in my line of work. Also, in 1999 I was one of the top OT earners at OldJob thanks to Y2K (largely due to a GroupWise upgrade from GW4.1 to GW5.5).
There are whole days when I'm doing nothing but my daily duties. This doesn't sound significant, but thanks to lots of automation my daily duties are a small percentage of my total work. I have time for this blog, for one, and that's something I didn't have time for at OldJob.
Not that OldJob was terribly stressful. It had its ups and downs, but I kept up. It was sort of like a long-distance jog once you get into the rhythm of it all; hard, but I can keep doing this for a l-o-n-g time. But like that long-distance run, I almost never had 'downtime' where I was thumb-twiddling.
My presence here has also freed up enough time that the senior of the two admins here can focus on automation projects. He created a system for automation of various things (such as account creation, intruder-lockout clears, password resets) a number of years ago, and in the time when my predecessor left and before I arrived almost no work was done on it due to overwork. Now that I'm here to take up workload, he's been downright buried in it and has managed to push forward a major improvement of functionality. Fact is, the next 6-12 months should see a complete rewrite of the system, something that couldn't have happened when it was just two of 'em around here.
Yep, life is slower here. Part of me misses the bustle of being that involved in this. But the rest of me points to the relatively lost salary I got by moving out here and the other part quiets down a bit. I'll get my share of crap soon enough.
There are whole days when I'm doing nothing but my daily duties. This doesn't sound significant, but thanks to lots of automation my daily duties are a small percentage of my total work. I have time for this blog, for one, and that's something I didn't have time for at OldJob.
Not that OldJob was terribly stressful. It had its ups and downs, but I kept up. It was sort of like a long-distance jog once you get into the rhythm of it all; hard, but I can keep doing this for a l-o-n-g time. But like that long-distance run, I almost never had 'downtime' where I was thumb-twiddling.
My presence here has also freed up enough time that the senior of the two admins here can focus on automation projects. He created a system for automation of various things (such as account creation, intruder-lockout clears, password resets) a number of years ago, and in the time when my predecessor left and before I arrived almost no work was done on it due to overwork. Now that I'm here to take up workload, he's been downright buried in it and has managed to push forward a major improvement of functionality. Fact is, the next 6-12 months should see a complete rewrite of the system, something that couldn't have happened when it was just two of 'em around here.
Yep, life is slower here. Part of me misses the bustle of being that involved in this. But the rest of me points to the relatively lost salary I got by moving out here and the other part quiets down a bit. I'll get my share of crap soon enough.