How fast the time flies.

It’s not going to be long until the 40-year veteran that had been overseeing the department retires and the reins of the agency will be in my hands. Not the biggest department ever, but still it’s one that is much different the what I’m used to. It’s a big step up on career ladder, but in real world experience it will bring, not to mention how the Data Services title sounds impressive on the resume, along with real-world experience using SQL, Unix text utilities like awk, grep, sed, vim — and also a R programming language. In many ways I’m a natural in position, as the tech skills are not my weakness. 

It’s been tough moving to a large suburban corporate office building, the massive cubicle farms, the lack of natural light and views, compared to my bright corner office in the Alfred E Smith Building. Once the current director retires at the end of the month, I’ll have her old office overlooking the old city dump on north side of the building with some natural light, which will be a step up from the cubicle.

I already have ambitious plans for decorating a boring drab corporate office space, with some of my plants, some photos and aerial imagery I’m going to have printed and framed. And I’m going to get some kind of a task lighting for the desk — either find in the closet a lamp or buy a used lamp at a tag sale or thrift shop — and hang some Christmas lights in the office. Maybe the colorful dancing string of Christmas lights I had in my old office or maybe some simple warm white lights. I could take some from my camping supplies or buy anew.

Truth is I’ve been so focused on a soul-crushing nature of the suburban corporate office, after a decade and a half working downtown ignoring all the benefits of my new position — somewhat better pay, mostly 9-to-5 work shift, more casual dress, easier bike ride in without having to do that climb up the State Street Hill. Or that with my new position I’m really getting to put my technical skills to the test. I run dozens of SQL queries each day, carefully crafted to get out the data I need from databases. I know the essentials of Unix scripting — bash scripts I can do to automate database updates and extract data I need to deliver to my clients. I installed R Studio on my work computer and use it to process Microsoft Excel documents from database dumps in ways much easier then doing it by hand.

I do like the technical nature of the work, though at times I feel like much of the agency has been trapped in old ways of doing things. Careful and methodological, but in some ways not fully taking advantage of what can be done with even my admittedly basic knowledge of Unix, SQL, and the R Statistical Language. I’m not a programmer — nobody will let me near any of the source code and I don’t trust myself allocating memory in C, but I do what can do be done in code for automation. That said, I am too willing to ship shit, with data being used in a professional environment, I have to embrace the careful, methodological methods of the agency, that keep mistakes from being propagated by shortcuts I’d be more then willing to adopt, as I’m lazy. In the professional world, unlike my blog, “if it fits, it ships” doesn’t really cut it.

Riding my bike to work four days last week, seemed to make the experience so much nicer. As did the freedom to escape the office during the lunch hour, ride around the Corning Preserve, some of the back streets of Menands and North Albany, head up to the Albany Rural Cemetery. On a bike, it doesn’t seem so isolated and suburban up there. Plus I’m getting to know the faces and people, learning their stories, building connections. It doesn’t seem quite as isolating, and strange, the new face on block after 4 weeks.

Truth is, I hated the new position at first. It was something the company asked me to do, something I was told I would be good at, but it was so foreign and such a change. I resist change. I knew it was in both my own best interest, and that of my company to take the position with my technical skills and knowledge, but it was not an easy adjustment to the more corporate lifestyle. But I do like being away from the craziness of downtown and all the politics. Politics may be in my blood, but it’s unhealthy, and it’s kind of nice to be away from all the issues and debates, some that if you take quite personally can make you angry. In the new job, it’s all about SQL and the bash shell, mail encoding software and updating records in the database. Not politics! And that’s a refreshing change.