It's interesting the difference a weekend can make. Last week, I applied for a new job, an opportunity to finally pull out of the dead end I'm in and get something with a potential future (not to mention a good $4K a year more in salary). I faxed the application materials to them, following the instructions on the job announcement, so I could be sure they'd have everything they needed before the opening closed on Friday. After a mediocre week, I get home Friday evening to find a letter from the HR people saying that they've removed my name from consideration because I hadn't submitted the proper application. Now, what I sent them had my work and cell phone numbers and my email address, so I'm a little miffed they chose to contact me by postal mail when they had to know I wouldn't receive anything until after it was too late to send them anything.
So my weekend got off to a great depressing start. Things did recover some Saturday evening with an all night gaming session at a friend's house, but I was still pretty bummed, and not at all looking forward to going in to work today. I figured it would be more of the same, except that I'd have to actually interact with people again now that my bosses were back from their three-day conference.
Today, however, started off well, and just kept getting better. My daughter woke up on her own, and was in a good mood and ready to get dressed and go to school for the first time in a week or two. She didn't even give me any trouble dropping her off, calling "I love you!" back over her shoulder as she ran into her classroom to finish breakfast. At work, I managed to quickly finish up two minor tasks I was working on, and got a message to call one of DHS's head web guys.
Far from continuing the antagonistic relationship our department has always had with them, he was really enthusiastic about a quick design favor I'd done for him, and wanted to work with me to get the code snippets ready for him to give to the web guys who needed it. In the course of our conversation, I let it slip to him that we had written some scripts that read data from an XML file to get around the fact we'd been denied permission to use a database to store the data in the past. Without missing a beat, he said, "Dude, you want access to the SQL server?" He went further to tell me that if I just sent him the table definitons and access controls, he'd get it set up himself and we could go full steam ahead.
Wow. Ever since I got this job, it's been one fight after another with them over various aspects of our website. It seemed like they hated the fact that they didn't have my level of experience and expertise with web application development, and they went out of their way to restrict what we were doing. I had tried to keep an open mind when everyone else at the office told me about the antagonistic attitude they had toward us, but I couldn't believe anything else after we were summoned to a meeting we were told was to help them hash out some web design standards, but which turned out to be a session for them to try to denegrate everything we'd accomplished since I'd come on board. Now, it seems, there's been a successful change of regime, and the web guys we're working with over there are excited about forging a new cooperative relationship, and about making use of the talent we can bring to the table.
It looks like this position will be less of a dead end, at least for a while, since I'll be able to use my experience as a developer more fully, and I may well have opportunities to learn new skills, rather than having those I do have stagnate.