Careers, Careers, Careers.

On being unhappy at work and 20 something
I love talking about careers. I'll just go ahead and say that. I'm always curious how people end up in the jobs they end up in and how they make the decision for what's next or when it's time to pull the cord.

I've said a few times recently that being mid to late 20's is a really interesting time - at any given time, you tend to be unhappy or want to change something about at least one of the following: Jobs, Relationships, or Housing Situations. Not  only is there always something that can be improved, everyone around you is more or less in the same boat, which makes things very interesting.

That being said, a lot of the people I hang out with are single, don't own a home (or anything more than a car, if that), have no kids, etc. I strongly feel that being this age, having several years of experience after college, and having almost no real reasons to need to avoid risk, 40+ hours a week is entirely too much of your life to go about being unhappy with work. In a lot of cases, It's so many hours that you don't even have time to think about what else you could be doing, besides wallowing in your unhappiness.

My own personal experience with that was dreading flying on Monday morning, every single Sunday night. Right around 6pm when I had to think about getting ready for the next week (Cash? Cab? Packed? ) I would start feeling incredibly anxious and that more than anything I DIDN'T want to fly the next day.  At some point I realized that I could either keep complaining about the travel and wallowing in the unhappiness... or I could change jobs.

For now, I'll leave this topic with a couple of articles to read:
The Four Year Career and the Flux Generation


On the conference line/web conferencing bat signal
I had one day in the last couple of weeks where I had both people in the office asking about conference lines and web conferencing, our existing vendor, and a new vendor calling to talk about possible contracts. Weird how the universe apparently got the sense that I wanted (or needed) to talk about conference lines in a systematic way.


"You're the egg mcmuffin of enterprise nerdiness"
A friend commenting on how I think the typo "ShartPoint" is Hilarious to me. Like, stop whatever you're working on and laugh for 5 minutes hilarious.

Watch this talk
ww.ted.com/talks/award_winning_teen_age_science_in_action.htm 

These girls are badass. In most cases, usually just took 1 person to take a chance on them - after the girls had the persistance to contact 10-20 professors they could possibly work with. Almost every time they only got one "yes" but that one yes was all they needed to do awesome things. It is worth noting that it ALWAYS started with their initiative. I do have to wonder though -  What do their parents do? How did they get interested/get the connections in the first place.


"Does she know how to be safe on Twitter?"
One of my coworkers approached me the other day saying he'd been using twitter more after I tagged him in a post. This lead to discussions with other coworkers concerned about if I knew how to be safe on twitter. My Coworkers response? "This is a girl who thinks about social media for a living". I do have to say, I'm guilty of the occasional curse laden or drunk tweet, but I still feel like the mix of my tweets is a fairly accurate representation of me.

90 days at the new job?
Already? Holy cow.
"You'll notice things actually getting done around here correlates to her arrival"
I'm also at the point that walking around the office is dangerous, I dont get back to my desk if I walk around because people need help. Cool to be valued, but weird to have the feeling of walking certain paths to avoid getting stopped, especially when I'm in a hurry.