Being a Federal Employee means being a part of something much bigger than many people, including myself, can really comprehend. The FAA employs about 50,000 people, with ~5,000 of them working here in Oklahoma. Susan supervises people in a dozen different states; her supervisor lives in a different state, too. My supervisor works in Oklahoma, and while I don’t manage other people (Thank God; I’m not all that great at managing myself!), I deal with networks and servers and people spanning across all fifty states and into five or six remote countries. Sometimes what I do feels pretty important, although… (read more)

Sorry about the lack of updates. For an entire week, I’ve been trying to come up with the right words to explain just how happy I am. I started a new job this week … and by “new job”, I mean “the job I did for almost ten years.” It’s the job I left last September — and now, I’m back. When I was younger I thought people only left jobs because they were unhappy, but over the past year I have learned that that’s not always the case. For essentially fifteen years I worked as a government contractor providing… (read more)

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… (read more)

Today, I did something I haven’t done in over a decade: I turned in my two weeks notice at work. I often tell people I’ve been working at the FAA since 1995, which is really a half-truth. It’s true I’ve been working at the FAA since 1995, but save for 18 months back in the late 90s, I haven’t been employed by them. Instead, I’ve been working as a contractor for a series of contracting companies, providing services for the FAA. Being a contractor isn’t embarrassing; it’s just easier to say “I work at the FAA” than to hash out… (read more)