"Hospital"

My job at Intel has ended. It ended a week early actually. Had I known they'd do that I probably would have left it earlier myself. Fine, whatever. I didn't make nearly the friends and contacts I would have liked at that job.

During the last weeks there I got a call from a recruiter for a new job in Sacramento. I didn't know it would go any where but I knew my contract expiration was coming up so I went with it. As it turned out that new job was going to start a week after the Intel one ended, a nice little week long vacation. Horray.

I did the phone interview first. While I was at Intel no less. I was going to try and do it at my computer in the lab but it turned it was too noisy what with all the PCs running. So I went outside and down the hall and sat down against a wall to give the interview.

I didn't do any mental prep in which I wrote out some success/failure memories of previous jobs or even laid down, closed my eyes and tried to visualize some stories. I've done that before. But not this time. As a result I didn't have examples at the ready and it took me a while to answer a lot of the questions.

This I took personally on myself, cursing myself for being unprepared. I did answer almost all the questions eventually and some of them I even answered correctly. Still as per the apparently high standards I've set for myself I thought I did rather poorly.

There were two people interviewing me, asking questions and presumably taking notes on how I answered.

As I said I thought I did rather poorly in this interview. I guess the two people interviewing me were impressed though because I got asked back to do an in-person interview.

This too had two people involved, one was from the phone interviewing, the second a different person.

While the phone interview was much more technical this in-person interview was much more psychological. More of test of ethics and practical kind of stuff.

This one I also thought I did rather poorly. In fact I was fairly certain I was bombing it. Then I kind of found my second breath and provided this whole for instance from my SBC job.

On the way out of the interview one of the two guys asked if I played World of Warcraft. I didn't (and don't) really and I tried to explain as much. Course usually if you're never going to see someone again you don't ask them about their favorite PC games. Right?

Still I was pessimistic to the recruiter. Trying to lower expectations. Then He called me back and said that wanted me and were very impressed with my abilities.

The pay rate is way, WAY lower that I would have liked. In fact I should have said "this much an hour minimum or I walk" is what I should have done. But no, I didn't do that.

Of course this whole premise was based on the possibility I could work at a location minutes from my house.

Oh yes, the position is at a major hospital in Sacramento. Actually it's a whole chain with lots of locations in the region. One of which is minutes from my house. I was assigned a hospital in down town Sacramento. In other words the exact place I DIDN"T want to be commuting to.

The first few weeks were rather rough. It always seems to take me four or five weeks to get my bearings and kind of see how it all works at a new job.

I already had to work one day in which I arrived at around 7am (get a good parking spot) started work at 8am and didn't actually leave the hospital until 4am THE NEXT DAY. I put pretty much all that time on my time card too. That'll learn em.

They use a series of web pages and links called Mirimba to install applicaitons. All the apps are on different pages and I found this inconvenient. So, I thought, I'll just copy the URLs of these links and stick them alll on one single HTML file. Then access that file from various PCs and there ya go. I guess this was really impressive to my manager.

I then also wrote some rather simple batch files for things like deleting the same shortcuts from the all users desktop and running various Mirimba links. I mean these are dead simple one command per line type batch files. I linked via my HTML file and I had an even more useful tool. This also apparently impressed my manager. That was just in the first two weeks.

In fact a lead I had been working with for the first couple weeks was going to back to his original hospital and requested I be the one that came with him. Which I didn't know at the time. His hospital was even further away from my house ya see. I requested I stay and a co-worker not opposed to the idea of switching go instead. A request that was granted.

Ok in the long run this was probably better, though there were times when I really hated said decision. The one co-worker I had left and I would call said ex-co-worker from time to time and he would say he was really bored from nothing to do. Hey, that could have been me, I thought. On the other hand I did learn an awful lot from my decidedly non-board experience at my hospital.

So thought brings us up to about last week. Last monday a new guy started at the job. A new guy who can do a crazy-ass amount of programming, in Delphi no less. In fact he graduated high school two years early and has had probably as many or more jobs than I have. And a photographic memory. He did "penetration tests" for a company for instance. Wow. Also, he's 19.

I haven't decided if that's something to be depressed about or not. I think just from being a live 11 years longer I have a bit more real-life experience than him. I think he's actually more knowledgable on almost everything than I am.

He wrote a program in Delphi for instance that scans the whole corporate network and takes down information like the printers installed and assosciated information, whether a particular application is installed, and whether some particular shortcuts are present on the desktop. Of course he had a lot more time to play with and develop this idea. Still very impressive.

In fact, defying all logic, I am actually giving up my chance to request I be moved to the hospital 10 minutes from my house specifically so I can keep working with and learning from him.

That's all I have for now. I'll continue this hopefully tomorrow.  ¶ 7:36 PM 0 Comments