I think this might work… All of it. Things are coming together!
First, my website, while still purple, is looking a lot cleaner. I’ve been able to re-size the image on the homepage so that it’s not distorted. I was able to set the text in both the about page & the blogs to justify, and this is saying a lot, because in order to do that, I had to dive into the main.css and the about index to get an understanding of how the classes work. Finally, look at my second blog from last week. It is so much cleaner than it was! I even got the list numbers to display at the correct size and add cleaner margins to the lists. This is all exciting stuff!
In addition to the website, I am now set up to solve clojure koans pretty efficiently. So far I’ve gotten through the first two sets, and ya know, I really enjoy those. Like little puzzle to help learn the language. They are fun, and they are a great way to start.
I’m excited to have an apple computer soon also, as that will make all of this a little bit more straight forward (or at least that’s what I’m told).
What else might work?
Well, work! My job. After careful & thoughtful consideration, I decided I was going to be up front with my boss about my plan. You see, I’ve been back at the site this week, mainly because I wanted to snoop around a little bit by have my ears perked open. This paid off.
Remember, we have a global health crisis on-going due to the coronavirus and the economy is not doing well.
It was on Tuesday that suddenly my boss & two of the other managers were behaving a little bit different: closing their office door, whispering, & gathering repeatedly. I sensed layoffs were coming or at least some kind of cutting.
After a little more contemplation on the best way to play my cards, I was able to come up with a few proposals for him, so yesterday, I asked to speak with him. I told him that I was not formally resigning right now, but that I did have intentions to leave the company. I explained that if layoffs are coming that “I volunteer as tribute!”. Once I got my nerves under control, I proposed my other ideas also:
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I resign, and we make it a clean cut.
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Because he knows I’m leaving anyway, they lay me off in place of someone else who is still adding value.
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I resign, but I stay on board for a few extra weeks, strictly working remotely to help ensure we have a smooth quarter end.
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(or, and this one is my favorite) I don’t resign and don’t get laid off, and instead we negotiate some terms for me to work strictly remotely part-time covering a dumb task that the engineers are currently required to do every day and that I happen to be very good at—I’m actually the best on site and mentor the others on how to do these transactions.
He was very appreciative that I told him what was going on ahead of making the cut as well as being willing to continue to support the site. He was actually really interested in option 4.
You see, my company is in a weird way with this economic crisis, and he knows this. If I quit, the odds are very high that he would not be allowed to backfill my position, so they’d be down a person. I am very good at this tedious, daily task, and he trusts me more than anyone else to get it right. Even if I only work 1-3 hours a day, I would be giving the engineers 3-10 manhours back each day, and having one point-person to go to for IRA questions would highly benefit him. They’ve wanted a role like this at the plant for years now, but the learning curve is very steep and there must be an understanding of the units and the software database to do it right.
Not to mention that with what I’m about to be studying, I would expect that I could find an efficient way to streamline the whole process for them—this is one of those things I mentioned in the last post that I’ve wanted to do for years, but just don’t have the skillset—yet.
Now he could try to cut my pay, but to do so, he’d have to go through HR. So again, with the times being weird, if he asks for permission, he risks them saying no to all of it. I believe it would be in his best interest to just work this out with me & the plant manager for a mutually beneficial arrangement at least until the chaos dies down.
Option 4 is a win-win for both of us, so… I think this might work!