A New Adventure Awaits…

I put in my notice last week.

To those of us who work in “The Industry” (ok, any ‘industry’), the ‘notice’ is a big thing. Two weeks to clean out your desk, clean out your cube, and erase all trace that you were ever there, while simultaneously attempting to pass on the collected knowledge of your time at the company to another person.

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Six years ago, I got an offer to join  the Team. An offer to become one of the Few, the Proud, the Magenta. A friend from my days back working for DariGold had been spending time at this local Telecom, and had spent two years telling me, “You really oughta come work here.” I’d fought the urge, telling my wife was certain that this telecom-thing was doomed to die in a few years.

I caved in.

Working for the tax company had been ok for a couple years, but I had reached my saturation point, and I couldn’t face more time dealing with the place. So I took the offer. I joined Team Magenta.

For six years, I worked, in various modes, for the Accounting and Finance departments, churning out little applications and big, helping the big A and F departments bang out month-end numbers with greater accuracy and less sweat. I made applications to import data from various sources into SQL, export from SQL to various destinations, and report on that data. I wrote web apps to ease the pains of month-end, quarter-end, and year-end. I wrote a monstrous application to allow auditors a pain-free’er way to audit retail locations.

Day in, day out, six years.

Slowly, but surely, I watched the company fold, like a flan in your underwear drawer. The Fatherland was asking more and more from a company that couldn’t feasibly produce it. How can you gain more customers in a market that is saturated, where the average person already has service, and is usually happy with it, or at least unwilling to leave it for potentially unknown other services? How do you rise from a hole created by potential merger-generated customer loss to the other big carriers? How do you claw your way back to being a competitor in a business that kills the failures and swallows them whole?

Apparently, the answer to all those questions is: You take away everything that makes your employees want to stay with the company to help it succeed. This was no longer where I wanted to be. But I had no ‘out’. Until LinkedIn came through for me, most unexpectedly.

A few short weeks ago, I got a notification from LinkedIn: someone with Getty Images wanted to talk to me about a job!

I jumped on it with both feet. A job – with a company so perfectly aligned with my passion – that offered me a way out of what had gradually become a humdrum existence. And they wanted to move fast. We went from “Hi, we’re Getty.” on the phone to “We’d like to interview you.” to an interview, and an offer, over the course of days.

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I put in my notice last week.

I’ve started cleaning out my cube, pulling my pictures off the walls. My awards are in a pile on the desk, my coding and design posters, along with my sports-fan posters, rolled up in a tube. All the push-pins are in their box. I’m ready to move out with only a few hours to pack and load up my car.

I hope I’m ready for that next step.

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