Long day. Longer night.

Whoo! Long day.

Things are a-brewin’ where I work. Back in May when I signed on, I was tasked with building a knowledge base that would serve many of the IT-related needs of a company that had expanded from 300 to over 2000 employees in the space of a year. With that kind of growth, the need for quick answers, plus the need to take the pressure off of an overworked IT support staff, required a comprehensive set of solutions that would quickly get most people’s problems solved online so they could continue their accustomed productivity.

Fast forward seven months, and I’ve been more of a manager of that knowledge base than a builder of it. The hard work is done, and the program nearly manages itself. The solution rate numbers are almost staggering to me - they’re far better than the industry average - and so this effort has been one of my better successes. In short, there hasn’t been too much screaming going on near my desk.

True, I could not have done it without a number of key people going to bat for me.

And yet I found myself facing my next challenge. Should I lapse into complacency, underutilized and marking time? Or, should I jump into the next frying pan?

You guessed it - I jumped. After all, a fella wants to contribute, to accomplish, to make something good happen. Plus, I couldn’t help but notice that we have a helluva bottleneck getting critical content loaded to the intranet web. Today was a long one because now, in addition to knowledge base administration and content development, I’ll be wearing a new hat, that of web developer. It was a natural direction on my particular path. But that path extends out for miles, and it’s a steep one.

Most of these IT guys probably don’t get home from work until 8:00 at night. I’m usually home by 5:00 or so, depending on the scale of my after-work errands. But I typically get into the office before most folks - about 7:30 in the morning. It’s all relative, I suppose, but I do confess to being a morning person, up with the sun, plus I always did like plenty of time to unwind my mind after work.

But I just got home - late, for me - and I still face much to do blogwise, business-wise, and otherwise. At this hour, I can’t tell you whether I’m toasted, baked, or fried. Worse, I can’t even tell you what wine to serve with myself.

Ugh. Long day. But I’m going to get it done. After all, I’m looking forward to letting off a little steam this weekend up in Santa Rosa, and I want to make the time for it; I don’t want to be thinking instead about all the things I should have done. Come to fruition, I’ll be at Annadel State Park for a little leg-stretching capped off by a little wine-pouring at Matanzas Creek. Whether you’ve guessed it or not, the energy I get out of this winehiking thing always seems to make the long days and longer nights worth every gigabit of energy I’ve been putting in.

~winehiker

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 9:47 pm and is filed under grape squeezins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.