American Dreaming – 1990’s / Part XVIII

New company, new challenges, new working conditions. I was both thrilled and curious as to where this job change would take me. My responsibilities (in comparison to the last job) were miniscule. I had no staff to manage, I had no responsibilities in other offices, my primary initial tasks were to ready the organization for a transition of the corporate messaging platform from their current reliance on Lotus Development Corp’s CC: Mail to a different product, Lotus Notes. The Notes platform offered messaging but, also had application development capabilities that provided for workflow and collaborative applications to be developed, deployed and managed centrally.

I took over a series of servers and readied them with new software and began testing the data conversion process to migrate the post office files within CC:mail to the .nsf file format that is native to Lotus Notes.

This was interesting work but, a huge paradigm shift for me coming from a 24/7/365 regimen of dealing with maintenance and troubleshooting a large network to being responsible for servers that (at the moment) had no users or corporate production responsibilities.

All of a sudden (it seemed) I had leisure time. This was such a foreign concept for me (given my work habits and assignments over the last 5+ years) that I had a very difficult time coping with this change. It seems odd and I know it wasn’t a particularly healthy outlook on work (and life) but this was truly an unusual time for me.

I initially began to deal with it (at work) by pitching in and getting involved in other aspect of the IT functions within this organization. I asked a lot of questions and learned about the desktop support standards, I willingly pitched in and assisted desktop techs and eventually the network technicians with troubleshooting and designs to meet the changing needs of this growing company. This added some time to my (perhaps under-utilized) working conditions but, didn’t address the leisure time question at all.

I had to retrain myself to accept that I did have some time outside of work that I could use to pursue self-interests. It was permissible for me to table my workaholic tendencies and seek out some fun venues to pursue and enjoy. Again, this was such an abstract concept for my mindset to accept. I began to take stock of my life, my role as a parent and began to ponder over what my options were.

As fate would have it, it was my role as a parent that led me to what was the next major event in my life. My son spent every weekend with me and I relished and looked forward to those times. It was on one such weekend that he asked me about an online service called AOL (America OnLine). I had a typical technician’s bias against this service. The Internet was a medium that I saw as having an infinite number of possibilities and the amount of information that was making its way to this network was staggering. I thought as long as you had access to the Internet, that AOL was somewhat irrelevant. Being the absentee parent and stricken by that guilt, I eventually acquiesced to his request and opened up an account with the service. My son utilized it to primarily gather information he was interested in with regards to electronic games.

After he left one Sunday, I decided to investigate what else was offered within this service.