Today is my one year anniversary of leaving IBM, really does feel like time has gone by quickly. I have to admit, it has taken me some time to get over the shell shock I had experienced working there the past few years, and I feel I am getting back to feeling like a person who has control of his life. I wish I could flip a switch on the past few years of IBM and forget them, but that is not possible, but makes me a bit of who I am today.
Work wise, I still feel quite invigorated with my job, and feel I learn things every day which I like. It somewhat makes me realize how little I did know and how I stopped learning at IBM. I had lost all my motivation for work at IBM, and with that, the learning went with it. The thought of learning something new when working at IBM, would wind up just giving a person more work to do, with the reality that would translate into working over time for free for that company. So a person just goes into a place where they just stick with what they know, in hopes of keeping a sane level of work and hours. It is nice to be some place, where learning really just benefits you in your job. When I started at my current job, I really knew nothing about powershell, but within a few months I had written a few powershell scripts for website creations, and I pulled a bit of satisfaction out of that, I feel like a systems administrator now.
Personally, I just feel a lot better about life in general. I feel I have more time to myself, I don’t come home at night with the burden and the stress that I carried at IBM. I find I sleep much more peacefully at night, I am more relaxed with my view on things, and a more responsive person all around. I like the idea that with my current job, I work in a office, with a desk and a desktop computer. When work is done for the day, I go home, I don’t bring work with me. With IBM, it just felt that work was always tagging along. With IBM a person could work at home, and for some people that was great, but for me, it was like inviting an unwanted guest into my house. Given that the oncall rotation was very frequent, the assigned laptop more often then not came home with me, just a reminder of IBM in my life outside of the office.
I had a desk setup at home for IBM work, and I have to say I hated it. Every time I looked at that desk, just sickly bad feelings came up about IBM, the stressful work and situations I was placed in, and how it had invaded my home life. For the past year, the desk just sat in my office, where I stacked things on it, but sadly a reminder of a past I would sooner forget. About a month ago, I re-purposed the desk into a desk for my modelling, so now I associate it with enjoyable things. I moved it to the basement, and it just looks like a desk of promise now, not the desk that I worked a 100 hour work week full of 100 hours of total stress.
I don’t regret working at IBM, as I did have some good years there, met some lifelong friends and worked with some good people. But I do regret that I stayed there so long. I really should have left years ago, once I saw the signs that employees like myself were no longer valued by the company. I have come to learn, things never change in those situations in organizations such as that. I regret that waiting so long set me back in my career, kept me back from maybe achieving or having things I wanted, and stalled me on my learning. As well, I let it over run my life, where I was no longer in control of it. I was so consumed by anger and bitterness towards the company in my final few years, that I had no energy to pursue the things I wanted out of life.
Where I am now in work, I am much happier, things are never perfect, but to be honest, I really don’t have any complaints. I find it funny in that my current employer spends a lot of time on employee feedback, but I am just happy where I am, I really have nothing to add in feedback and if I did, it would be of a very trivial nature. I have not added much to this blog the past year, it might be that I just really needed to catch my breath, that I had no real negative feelings pushing me. I was getting used to being content with life, that I found I did not have much to say. I am looking forward to some fun things coming up for me, I plan to get back into podcasting with some new podcasts coming, as well focusing more on other hobbies as well.
What can I say, but it has been a pretty good year, looking forward to the next one.
Tags: Life
