Major Updates
Hello everybody,
Here’s a big old life update for anyone who hasn’t heard from me since I moved on from Rice, or for even longer in some cases. First thing to note:
*begin fanfare*
Yes, I graduated.
*end fanfare*
As a HISTORY(business) double major I was really quite fortunate to pick up a superb job as a Technical Account manager for Microsoft. On the plus side, I get world class benefits, excellent pay and masses of professional training. On the downside, I occasionally feel like Han Solo heading towards the evil Death Star saying “we can’t turn around kid, we’re caught in a tractor beam”.
My job is actually remarkably advanced, not at all like the cubicle farm, data entry monkey-work I anticipated being grateful for straight out of college. Essentially, I am responsible for the IT operational health of up to 15 major companies at a time. It involves management of people, resources, and contracts. I have to work directly with CEO’s, CIO’s and experienced IT infrastructure managers. It’s basically an immediate jump into middle management of a global company, which is a far bigger role than I ever expected to have at this stage of life. I bought a bunch of new clothes to look professional in but I still get home every day grateful that nobody has (yet) called me on having graduated only about 15 minutes ago.
I’ve been at the MSSU training session (read: Microsoft boot camp) in Seattle for the last two weeks. I've been getting up at about 6:30 every day for a 7:00 bus trip to the massive Redmond campus, which as you may already know is really very attractive in summer, which is when I always seem to be visiting Seattle. We always end up leaving 15 minutes late due to the same French prat who won't ever arrive at the bus on time, leading to long breakfast lines and the rehashing of historical cultural bitterness issues. There are actually loads of international people here, in fact tonight I've been invited to a party with the English contingent (yes I'm still English, honest...). By the time I get home from this whole event I'll have an extensive international network of MS employees in my system, which is part of the whole point of this event. The days go late but then we get to expense our evening's dinner to the tune of about $40 every night, so I've been eating a drinking well. You can’t levitate an expired feline in a circle without hitting a steakhouse in Bellevue.
The training here has been mostly of high quality and good for my professional development. I'd say there's about a 70:30 ratio of useful material to silly bullshit. One of the more obvious silly bullshit moments were the two hours we spent being trained in "core company values" by a "Microsoft Evangelist" (yes, that's a job title here. Yes, his eyes burn with the passion of a Jehovah's Witness and yes it is creepy to see). I think he was a motivational speaker before being suborned by The Man. We learned, in what felt like a college orientation week pep rally, that the little finger is the "passion" finger, the ring finger is for "integrity", the middle finger is for "big challenges" and so on and so forth. The open palm can mean both "openness and honesty" and also represent the hand with which we smack the bitches who try to steal our API with court orders. On the plus side, ever since that session I've been able to give the "big challenges" finger to people and get away with it. Even tried it on the MSSU director during a geoteaming event last Saturday. I think he appreciated my fine, dry wit, as evidenced by his later giving me a logo'd business card holder and delivering a five minute speech about my multifaceted virtues to the assembled group. Yeah, that was probably for the finger.
This training conference has actually taught me a lot about this job I'm supposed to be doing when I get back. It's actually not one of Microsoft's usual college hire positions. The average age of the TAMs in my group is probably around 35, the next youngest after me being 29. They've all had at least 5 or 6 years of industry experience as account managers before Microsoft took them on. So it's going to be quite challenging to keep up with them. If I can do a good job here then obviously it means that there's fantastic potential for resume building and a rocket booster for my career. I love this company's working environment and atmosphere and benefits, but it's possible that I might think about moving in five or six years, after getting experience and maybe a couple of degrees like an MSCE, ITIL and even an MBA with Microsoft's tuition bonuses. The trouble with a being at a (relatively) small company staffed exclusively by smart and experienced people is that it's really hard to distinguish yourself enough to break from low-middle management, where I started (still a subject of much private amusement to me as I watch people with much harder college degrees filling out TCP reports at minor companies), into the tightly limited number of higher or executive management. Particularly at a company like this one which notoriously hires out for its top talent, rather than growing it. You also don't tend to be paid as highly as you could be elsewhere in the industry after you've had several years' experience here. So it's possible that I will end up trading my great security for a move to another large company in the IT industry if they offer me a hike up into upper management and a better chance to break into real executive management before I'm 40. I figure I might actually be able to pull off a pretty stellar career if I can make myself stop giving the Big Challenges finger to directors at company events.
Home life (that distant thing which hopefully will resume quickly when I get back) is going well, I think. I’m living with a lovely Mexican girl who, as a normal criteria for women that I date, is considerably smarter and more charming than I am. There have been rough spots and challenges in the last few months, such as a douchey ex-boyfriend of hers being, well, douchey, and other painful moments like the time that I machine laundered a bag of hand-wash and dryclean-only clothes. Never have I seen so many bitter tears shed over a $12 shirt. But those were mostly mended at a local tailor, and I'm getting gradually less concerned about the impact of the douchey ex-boyfriend as happy times go by and painful events recede further into the past. Geli recently had to pay an enormous sum of money towards half of the surgery bill for one of her cats that still lives with Dean (the aforementioned douche), and ironically by doing so made it more likely for him to keep them both in the future since the cat is a lot better now and less of a pain to take care of. That's sad, but I'm still going to start twice-weekly allergy injections when I get home so that we can potentially get a new crop of kittens to replace our runaway Chili in a few months. At least the surgery payment seems to have reduced the number of times per month that Dean does something nasty to Geli just to make her cry. If we can get through her upcoming visit to Houston (and, of course, him and the cats) without any major incidents of regression then I think we're going to be ok for the long run.
The rest of home life is getting all settled and major goals worked towards, like exercising enough to get back into my best fighting shape and starting to socialize with new people so that we do something other than work, eat, shop and sleep for the next few months. After one miss already I’m on the lookout for a quality martial arts master who can continue my development in that area. I also want to do some more artwork with my engravings and get back into regular guitar practice, both of which were interrupted by the transition between shiftless college student and unexpectedly important (hence busy) corporate cog. I think a regular routine will soon develop and make those possible.
The only recent excitement in my life was last night, when Geli, sitting at her computer and chatting to me in the privacy of our living room in a state of undress, looked up and saw a guy standing on our patio filming her through a gap in the shades. He legged it immediately but left behind messed up furniture and some footprints. The police filed a report and had a quick glance around and then forgot about it. I've got her leaving the alarm on, the balcony lights on, the windows carefully closed and a note outside indicating that if anyone else stands there with a camera they'll be lucky if the police get to them before the dogs do. More usefully, when I get home I'm going to sit out of view of the windows and keep an eye out for creepy-stalker-man, and if he stops by again he's going to suffer some incidental capture-related broken bones before I pin him to the ground by some of the more sensitive pressure points and wait for the police to come collect him. If you can say one good thing about Texas it's that they have good, liberal laws about how much force you can use to protect your home against intruders.
I'm going to go ahead and post this now since I have a headache and the unmarked "ehhhh, for hedayks" pill that my Israeli roommate just gave me may or may not have been some kind of controlled substance under US law. You’ll know if it was because the last few lines of this post will suddenly become AWESOME.
Ooooh, the pretty colors…. Hey, if you spot the leopard again can you tell him that the cake is in the trunk….?
No, just kidding, I guess it was Israeli aspirin.
Be or stay in touch everyone, don’t let old connections fade out.
Cheers,
Chris