Nucomer

Here I sit, at my kitchen table, waiting for the cable guy to pass by “anytime between 7:30am and 5pm today”. The window in the livingroom is affording me a gorgeous view of the church across the road, and snowflakes are falling lightly, today. Good time to blog, I told myself. I have been putting off writing about the new job, so I may as well do so now, really.

I am resistant to change. I hate being challenged. I shy away from responsibility. I often think I am not as good or as qualified as others may suppose or expect me to be.

Disliking complacency, I embrace change. I often go for the harder or more challenging route in many situations. I am considered by many to be quite responsible and rather dependable. I’m better than the average at many things and people around me seem to have a surprising amount of faith in my abilities. Surprising to me, anyhow.

In both work and in dance I will have days where I am convinced I am fucking brilliant and in the right field, which are swiftly followed by days where I feel horribly under-qualified and will soon be “found out” as an imposter and be a disappointment all-around to everyone including myself. I go through this inner toggling back and forth all the time, and it does get tiring, at some point.

“Look,” I told myself before starting the new job at Nucom, “here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to be a bit excited and gung-ho for the first few days and then you will crash and think that this job isn’t right for you, that you might even suck at it, wonder if it’s all a threat and impediment to your artistic career and then fling yourself onto the couch (and its ottoman) at home lamenting: “Oh dear goddess, what the fuck am I doing with my life?!?!” where you will collapse in a bevy of dramatic tears worthy of any aspiring B-movie actress. Let’s say we ignore that bit and just concentrate on learning all the new acronyms that get bandied about at work, which should take care of about 40% of the adjustment, and just concentrate on settling yourself in comfortably. Worry about everything else, later.”

Naturally, all of the above came to pass as expected, and is only now starting to settle down to a workable level. Was it a separation anxiety from the old job? Hardly, I actually recovered from missing the old place within the first week. A few tears were shed for people I would genuinely miss talking to on a daily basis, but of course I am continually making new friends at Nucom and am increasingly enjoying the positive energy I now fully realize that the previous place had been chronically drained of. Surprisingly, every single person on the Nucom team is really nice, positive, hard-working (yet not obnoxiously so), and competent. My kind of people.

The new position at Nucom is treating me well. It’s a leap away from coding and design and smack-dab in the middle of clients and project juggling. Now I’d have to go a developer’s machine if I even want to see code. My daily hours are extremely packed with work, leaving me often breathless by the end of the day. I’m running at 96% productivity as an average, no joke. At first, I found the pace exhausting and worrisome, but now I am learning when to expect the rushes and when to anticipate roadblocks and more importantly, what days to bring my lunch to work. I am enjoying the switch to working professionally in French, which is a first, for me. I also got two days off to go and perform in Vancouver (whee!) at the beginning of next month, so that automatically makes me feel better.

And so there we have it. Life goes on, and quite well, too.

Hmph. Wouldn’t you know it, it’s 3:15 and still no sign of the cable guy, I’m betting he’ll appear at 4:55.