Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes when I don’t post for a while it’s because nothing interesting is going on in my life. And sometimes when I don’t post for a while, it’s because things are so crazy that I haven’t had time to sit down and sort my thoughts out yet before I type them up. My recent stretch of silence is due to the latter.

The last time I quit a job was in September of 2009, when I left my old department (as a contractor) and moved to my current department, as a federal employee. My ideal career path would have been to stay in my old department and move into a federal position, but after waiting almost a decade for that to happen, I felt like I had to move on. In September of 2009, I accepted a federal position with a new department. It was very hard for me to leave my old job, as I had been working with some of the same people for almost fifteen years and I deeply enjoyed the work I was doing.

The new job has been a lot of fun as well. As a member of a security scanning team, my job is to perform security network scans, interpret the results and document them in reports. I work with a bunch of great guys, and over the past nine months I’ve had the opportunity to perform onsite security scans for government agencies in Durham, New York City, New Jersey, Colorado, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

I wasn’t really looking for another job, but one found me — my old one. Except this time, I’ll be going back as a federal employee. (I’m getting a promotion, too, which never hurts!) When this opportunity presented itself, I literally could not turn it down. I’ll be going back to my old room and working with my old friends once again. It will be working where I know, with people I know, doing what I know how to do. It’s totally my comfort zone, and it feels like I’m “going home”.

I turned in my two weeks notice on July 2nd, which would have made my last day at the current job Saturday, July 17th (the end of a pay period). My current boss has asked me to stay on one additional pay period, which I agreed to. My last day at the current job will be Saturday, July 31st. I start the new job Sunday, August 1st.

The next three weeks will be spent cross-training co-workers on what I do and what I know, which has actually been great fun so far. Last week I did a small class on web penetration testing which spilled over into SQL injections and a few other related topics. On Friday we did some wireless network scanning, and I’ll be working with the guys on documenting some of those processes before I leave as well.

In three weeks the new job will become the old job, and my old job will become my new job.