I'm mainly posting this here rather than in community because I don't have the time to keep up with community. 
This is going to be really, really long, and I promise there'll be some real computers and the Internet relevance somewhere along the line.
Some of you will recall I got canned from my previous job in a pretty spectacular fashion. Since then, things have just gotten better. Everyone had told me for years that my previous job was bad for me, but I didn't realize how true it was. Beaten wife syndrome, I guess.
So here's the story, a lot has happened but I'll try to stick to the Reader's Digest version. Because typing "my former employer" over and over gets annoying, I'll just call them ExCompany.
ExCompany was a "payment gateway." In a nutshell, there's a ton of work that goes into processing credit cards online, expense, security, regulations, proprietary hardware and software and interfaces and on and on. And if you do the work to get onto one credit card network, You will probably someday in the future end up doing the work to get onto another network, like a NACHA system for taking checks online. It's too much for the average merchant to worry about. So a payment gateway handles all that, and merchants just have to interface with the payment gateway, which is usually as simple as making a form that posts to it, like you would for a paypal payment. It can also be more complex, for the big merchants who have in house programmers and big existing systems for handling payments, or the ones who use "shopping carts." Nearly any "shopping cart" you've ever used online to buy something connects to a payment gateway to do the work of processing the payment.
If you've ever been a merchant, you've probably been through the process of getting a swipe terminal for credit card processing. We're the online equivalent of that, you get a merchant account from VITAL or FDR or Global or whoever and put that into our system, and we do the rest.
ExCompany was never more than about fifteen empoyees large, if that. There were three owners, one of whom was a programmer and had written the entire system. They had just moved into an office, and hired a CEO, and a tech support guy, and me, the second programmer (and only other programmer in my four-five years there, which I will probably call five if I refer to it again. It was like 4.2years.) This was before the dot-com bust, and I was in on the ground floor at the next Big Thing.
My boss, the programmer, is a totally amazing guy. There was during the course of my employ, some doubt that the system I was working on was the greatest in the world. But in retrospect I see this impression came mainly from the non-technical aspects of the business; the sales, and marketing, and particularly the CEO. The system that my boss had written was *excellent* and he is truly a brilliant programmer. I think, as a result of that, I always leaned on him too heavily for things I should have been capable of myself; I feel as though I acted poorly at that job.
The CEO of ExCompany was a hired CEO, the kind you get when you recognize you have no business sense. The problem with that proposition, I'm sure some of you see, is if you have no business sense, what are your chances of hiring the right CEO? I'll say no more about it.
One thing after another went right with our software, one thing after another went disappointingly with our business, especially after the dot com fallout. There was incredibly high turnover and the CEO fired people left and right. I was thankfully insulated from him by my boss, the programmer. As far as I was concerned, the CEO and I got along fine and if he was an a**hole, it was never to me -- I just figured those other guys were even worse employees than me.
Two of those other guys were the other two owners, they both ended up getting fired. The tech guy got fired, long before, so of the original group, there was the programmer, the ceo, and me. Everyone else kept passing in and out, some of the same people sometimes, even. At one point I got to check out the revolving door myself with a "layoff" of a few months when they "couldn't afford me." It should be noted I signed on originally at 1/2 my previous salary on a promise of a big raise "in six months or so when we go public." Neither ever happened.
I kept my head down, mostly. I was the only employee who didn't have to go to the meetings, so I never did. My boss let me have the privelege of only dealing with him, in just about every sense, and being a programmer and a damn fine one, he was a pretty lax boss. So I never knew anything about the business side of the business, just the tech. I never investigated anything our competitiors did, either, just worked on ideas passed down to my through my boss. Which were all brilliant -- so I never knew the sorry state of the competition, or how good we truly were.
All right, that's the history. Sorry I ramble on. So when I got fired, the first thing I did was call up one of the previous owners of ExCompany who had been canned as mentioned. He told me it was about time I got out of there, and he had a job lead for me, not a programming gig, but something I could just take for a month to keep food on the table. I assume he knew how much I was(n't) getting paid at ExCompany.
Turns out the job lead is with another ex-employee of ExCompany. He's now managng a payment gateway branch of a much larger parent company. I'm a little worried about taking a job at a real company instead of a little place, but then I find that parent company is trying to sell off the payment gateway, it's in the process of becoming it's own deal. It's got it's own office a town over from ParentCompany's HQ, and everything. This payment gateway spinoff, though, is just as small as easygoing as ExCompany. Well, almost. I get to wear jeans and a t-shirt, but no holes in either and no logos on the t-shirt. I can deal with that.
The job is covering tech support. The tech support guy is getting married, and has a three week long honeymoon in Bora Bora. Mainly, it's helping the bigger merchant's programmers and the people who write shopping carts certify their systems against ours. This was a step that is Really Cool, in my opinion, and reflects on the size of ParentCompany. ExCompany never thought to do such things -- although in their defense, it might have been my job to come up with that idea... who knows.
I did my homework before I even went in the first day to learn from the Tech Support guy. Their interface is similar to one I wrote at ExCompany, but the differences are startling. Startlingly bad. I don't want to talk too much about it 'till it's truly an ex-issue, which it isn't yet, I'll get to that. In a nutshell, everything at NewCompany reflects it's size and power. But it's technology says things you wouldn't expect from a big company. At first I thought it said, "We're in a hurry, and we'll be upgrading these systems soon." 'Cause it's not horrible, it's just bad. But I've learned these systems have been in place for over two years. In fact, I learned it when I did a google search for the company's technology to see if anyone had commented on it, seeing the same things I saw. At this point, I'm still seeing all the technology as a complete outsider, I don't know anything but the interface and documentation you can download right off their website. And I found just such a post, dated two years ago. In their defense, most of this crew came together about six months ago from what I can figure; I'm not sure how it operated before that. It may have been a neglected little branch of the parent company.
In the first day of learning how to handle their tech support from the honeymooner, I found there was much more to be improved upon than the public interface. Now, at this point, I also learned they had a new solution to be rolled out in a few months that would address some of their major needs. But it was obvious to me immediately it would leave them in the same position inevitably, of being stuck in their old needs and unable to move forward. I explained all this to my boss, who agreed, and found myself meeting with all the technical people at ParentCompany, who had come up with this new solution. I had to explain to all of them why their new solution was no good, and why their current solution was no good, and how I could make it all good. They all agreed. Well, to be fair, only one of them I spoke to directly, at first, and he agreed, and he talked to their CIO or CTO, whichever one it is that handles internal technology, and he agreed, and that was that.
We came up with a plan to fix things, and the guys at ParentCompany said they could have it done in two months. This was during a conference call, and my new boss, the manager of SpinoffCompany, says to me, "They can do that in more like 30, right?" and so I said to them, can we do 30? And they came down to 45 days. This is all significant, you'll see.
That night I sat up thinking more about wha tI'd learned about where they were and what they needed. I came up with a new solution, bsed on their current technology, that completely avoided any need to rely on ParentCompany's people to get it in place and useful. The real insight came when I let myself think in terms of an "interim" solution. This will be version 1.5, and I'll buy myself six months to work on a real solution for them, a 2.0. It was good, it would work, and what's more, I could do it in 30 days. With time to spare.
And I did, that and then some. Days I covered tech support and met with people and learned more about what they needed, nights I coded. Hard. I still feel I should have been able to do it in a week, it's not complicated stuff. It took me three, plus a few extra days when I learned about a new need and a new capability.
All SpinoffCompany has going for it technically is TechSupportGuy. Everything else is ParentCompany's programmers and tech people. They apparently have no time, so while I've been meeting with them and getting nods and smiles and promises of "we can get you that," I didn't actually get anything from them... every time there was a promise of, "we can do that," it was followed up by me coming up with a new way to not need that, or cover it myself. Bottom line is I own this project, the whole thing. Its the first time in my life I've been put in a position where I felt like I was free to take complete control of something, and I stepped in and did it.
TechSupportGuy came back from BoraBora. He was a little miffed at first to find the replacement he'd hired as a temp, and maybe had some visions of hiring on so he could do something more interesting than tech support, is now the one doing the more interesting things. I wouldn't say I'm his boss, but that's only because I have an extremely conservative view of proper relationships -- the same thing that's stopped me from taking complete control of anything before, because I always had a boss who's job I figured that was. Yes, I realize that's Wrong. Anyhow, I'll be working with him a lot, I'm going to try to use him to do parts of the new system. I asked him what programming languages he knows, since I knwo he wanted to be the one to work on the new stuff, I thought I could let him work on it with me. His reply was something along the lines of, "HTML, javascript..." blah blah blah. Funny story, but perfect for my needs; my "graphical interface" skills are weak. I can use an HTML table, and that's about as far as I go. So I can use him to do that, I've seen his presentations and they're very pretty. I'm a little scared it'll be some mess of generated HTML like you get from Save as HTML in Word, though... if it is, I don't knwo what I'll do. This interim solution only required a programmer's interface, no HTML involved. ... anyhow:
At the same time he came back, I got hired on as a regular employee. My title is to be pretty much anything I like, I assume -- I never asked for a title at my last job and wound up with "Senior Programmer." I imagine it'll end up similar here, though the things I've handled so far and probably will handle into the forseeable future are a lot more diverse than that.
Especially Linux systems administration. I can't bring myself to run a corporate system on Windows, for reasons I'm all to happy to discuss with anyone who wants to get into that, but this post is definately long enough already, and I'm only feeling about 3/4ths of the way done. Consider it my JREF fix, I haven't been around enough lately. Anyhow, my point was, all their systems are Windows, and I think that's rotten. I can show them ways it has cost them already, many ways. Fortunately, the guy at ParentCompany I had to pitch all my ideas to initially is cool with Linux, and so now they have their first Linux box. It may become a BSD box when I have nore time to make such considerations. Input is welcome. I'm running Debian on it, this time for mainly philosophical reasons. ParentCompany wouldn't bat an eye at paying Redhat's extortionistic fees for RedHat ES(*), but I wouldn't sleep as well at night knowing I'd bowed down to -The Man-. Similar for SuSe. Debian gives the Eric S Raymond in me tingles, and still gets a fair amount of corporate support, so I went with it.
(*"Need a place to host your system, Scribble? ParentCompany figured we would and bought a hosting company. Go meet them and find out what they need to do for you." Okay, it didn't happen exactly like that, but close. They bought the hosting company for a few other reasons primarily, which is good, because I don't think it's suited to our system long term.)
Boss asked me to name my salary when TechGuy came back and my "contract" with them was up. I told him a low number now, ad a high number later. We've just released the "interim" version of my software last week, and my plan for the complete solution is rougyl six months, plus continuing work as needs arise. There's plenty of other things they need a programmer for, too. I feel guilty asking for a lot of money before I've done anything for them, though, when TechGuy came back it was still a week or so to the release of my interim version, so they hadn't really seen anything yt, just had a ton of faith in me. In my opinion, a progrmamer like my boss at ExCompany would have done it in a week or less, and it took me closer to a month, so I didn't feel that a week's work was enough to judge me by, either, but when the full thing is good, then they'll know what I'm truly worth. So, low number now and high number later, I said.
Boss liked low number. Boss liked highnumber. Boss liked the plan. He wondered if I'd like to become a shareholder, too. He thought with lownumber and the work I'd done (which he hadn't even seen yet!!) they would want me to have a real investment in the company. The shareholders had a meeting a week later, where I'm told the VP stood up and said "Scribble has managed to do in three weeks what our people didn't do in two years." How could I lose?
Now boss only had time to give me tht quote, promise to talk to me more later, and take off to meet a client or something across the country until next week. So I'm still kind of in limbo as far as the bigger picture goes, but honestly, my main motivation at this point is how freaking fun it is to design this system from the ground up, in a way that's truly smart (as far as I'm concerned, anyhow.) It's sometihng I can be proud of all on my own, unlike at ExCompany where the best I could do was say, "Yeah, I wrote that part." And "That part" was usually just some add on module, not the core logic. though I had to modify plenty of the core logic along the way at Excompany, the framework was all in place before I got there. PLus, compared to the systems SpinoffCompany and ParentCompany have been using at many levels, I can't help but do better. Many of these systems have been contracted out to programming firms, and their work is crap. I dont' think of myself as a great programmer even now, but lately I've been thinking I'm better than I thought. If that made sense. Heh!
And once we get some real clients on it this week, I'll know how good I am. All my testing indicates I'm smart enough, but then my skeptical nature will only trust the real deal. If it turns out I've done as well as I've come to think I have, I won't have to worry about asking for high number later. I'll be able to get it anywhere.
So thanks for listening. Yes, I'm still alive. Just busy. Still plenty to do, too! It feels wonderful to be working at a place where I'm appreciated; where they've needed someone just like me for so long and been hurting so badly for lack of it. And with the system being all mine, I'm usually more interested in making it better than debating philosophy lately. Perhaps when it starts to look really good I'll be around more, about six months. Till then, I won't be a total stranger.
This is going to be really, really long, and I promise there'll be some real computers and the Internet relevance somewhere along the line.Some of you will recall I got canned from my previous job in a pretty spectacular fashion. Since then, things have just gotten better. Everyone had told me for years that my previous job was bad for me, but I didn't realize how true it was. Beaten wife syndrome, I guess.
So here's the story, a lot has happened but I'll try to stick to the Reader's Digest version. Because typing "my former employer" over and over gets annoying, I'll just call them ExCompany.
ExCompany was a "payment gateway." In a nutshell, there's a ton of work that goes into processing credit cards online, expense, security, regulations, proprietary hardware and software and interfaces and on and on. And if you do the work to get onto one credit card network, You will probably someday in the future end up doing the work to get onto another network, like a NACHA system for taking checks online. It's too much for the average merchant to worry about. So a payment gateway handles all that, and merchants just have to interface with the payment gateway, which is usually as simple as making a form that posts to it, like you would for a paypal payment. It can also be more complex, for the big merchants who have in house programmers and big existing systems for handling payments, or the ones who use "shopping carts." Nearly any "shopping cart" you've ever used online to buy something connects to a payment gateway to do the work of processing the payment.
If you've ever been a merchant, you've probably been through the process of getting a swipe terminal for credit card processing. We're the online equivalent of that, you get a merchant account from VITAL or FDR or Global or whoever and put that into our system, and we do the rest.
ExCompany was never more than about fifteen empoyees large, if that. There were three owners, one of whom was a programmer and had written the entire system. They had just moved into an office, and hired a CEO, and a tech support guy, and me, the second programmer (and only other programmer in my four-five years there, which I will probably call five if I refer to it again. It was like 4.2years.) This was before the dot-com bust, and I was in on the ground floor at the next Big Thing.
My boss, the programmer, is a totally amazing guy. There was during the course of my employ, some doubt that the system I was working on was the greatest in the world. But in retrospect I see this impression came mainly from the non-technical aspects of the business; the sales, and marketing, and particularly the CEO. The system that my boss had written was *excellent* and he is truly a brilliant programmer. I think, as a result of that, I always leaned on him too heavily for things I should have been capable of myself; I feel as though I acted poorly at that job.
The CEO of ExCompany was a hired CEO, the kind you get when you recognize you have no business sense. The problem with that proposition, I'm sure some of you see, is if you have no business sense, what are your chances of hiring the right CEO? I'll say no more about it.
One thing after another went right with our software, one thing after another went disappointingly with our business, especially after the dot com fallout. There was incredibly high turnover and the CEO fired people left and right. I was thankfully insulated from him by my boss, the programmer. As far as I was concerned, the CEO and I got along fine and if he was an a**hole, it was never to me -- I just figured those other guys were even worse employees than me.
Two of those other guys were the other two owners, they both ended up getting fired. The tech guy got fired, long before, so of the original group, there was the programmer, the ceo, and me. Everyone else kept passing in and out, some of the same people sometimes, even. At one point I got to check out the revolving door myself with a "layoff" of a few months when they "couldn't afford me." It should be noted I signed on originally at 1/2 my previous salary on a promise of a big raise "in six months or so when we go public." Neither ever happened.
I kept my head down, mostly. I was the only employee who didn't have to go to the meetings, so I never did. My boss let me have the privelege of only dealing with him, in just about every sense, and being a programmer and a damn fine one, he was a pretty lax boss. So I never knew anything about the business side of the business, just the tech. I never investigated anything our competitiors did, either, just worked on ideas passed down to my through my boss. Which were all brilliant -- so I never knew the sorry state of the competition, or how good we truly were.
All right, that's the history. Sorry I ramble on. So when I got fired, the first thing I did was call up one of the previous owners of ExCompany who had been canned as mentioned. He told me it was about time I got out of there, and he had a job lead for me, not a programming gig, but something I could just take for a month to keep food on the table. I assume he knew how much I was(n't) getting paid at ExCompany.
Turns out the job lead is with another ex-employee of ExCompany. He's now managng a payment gateway branch of a much larger parent company. I'm a little worried about taking a job at a real company instead of a little place, but then I find that parent company is trying to sell off the payment gateway, it's in the process of becoming it's own deal. It's got it's own office a town over from ParentCompany's HQ, and everything. This payment gateway spinoff, though, is just as small as easygoing as ExCompany. Well, almost. I get to wear jeans and a t-shirt, but no holes in either and no logos on the t-shirt. I can deal with that.
The job is covering tech support. The tech support guy is getting married, and has a three week long honeymoon in Bora Bora. Mainly, it's helping the bigger merchant's programmers and the people who write shopping carts certify their systems against ours. This was a step that is Really Cool, in my opinion, and reflects on the size of ParentCompany. ExCompany never thought to do such things -- although in their defense, it might have been my job to come up with that idea... who knows.
I did my homework before I even went in the first day to learn from the Tech Support guy. Their interface is similar to one I wrote at ExCompany, but the differences are startling. Startlingly bad. I don't want to talk too much about it 'till it's truly an ex-issue, which it isn't yet, I'll get to that. In a nutshell, everything at NewCompany reflects it's size and power. But it's technology says things you wouldn't expect from a big company. At first I thought it said, "We're in a hurry, and we'll be upgrading these systems soon." 'Cause it's not horrible, it's just bad. But I've learned these systems have been in place for over two years. In fact, I learned it when I did a google search for the company's technology to see if anyone had commented on it, seeing the same things I saw. At this point, I'm still seeing all the technology as a complete outsider, I don't know anything but the interface and documentation you can download right off their website. And I found just such a post, dated two years ago. In their defense, most of this crew came together about six months ago from what I can figure; I'm not sure how it operated before that. It may have been a neglected little branch of the parent company.
In the first day of learning how to handle their tech support from the honeymooner, I found there was much more to be improved upon than the public interface. Now, at this point, I also learned they had a new solution to be rolled out in a few months that would address some of their major needs. But it was obvious to me immediately it would leave them in the same position inevitably, of being stuck in their old needs and unable to move forward. I explained all this to my boss, who agreed, and found myself meeting with all the technical people at ParentCompany, who had come up with this new solution. I had to explain to all of them why their new solution was no good, and why their current solution was no good, and how I could make it all good. They all agreed. Well, to be fair, only one of them I spoke to directly, at first, and he agreed, and he talked to their CIO or CTO, whichever one it is that handles internal technology, and he agreed, and that was that.
We came up with a plan to fix things, and the guys at ParentCompany said they could have it done in two months. This was during a conference call, and my new boss, the manager of SpinoffCompany, says to me, "They can do that in more like 30, right?" and so I said to them, can we do 30? And they came down to 45 days. This is all significant, you'll see.
That night I sat up thinking more about wha tI'd learned about where they were and what they needed. I came up with a new solution, bsed on their current technology, that completely avoided any need to rely on ParentCompany's people to get it in place and useful. The real insight came when I let myself think in terms of an "interim" solution. This will be version 1.5, and I'll buy myself six months to work on a real solution for them, a 2.0. It was good, it would work, and what's more, I could do it in 30 days. With time to spare.
And I did, that and then some. Days I covered tech support and met with people and learned more about what they needed, nights I coded. Hard. I still feel I should have been able to do it in a week, it's not complicated stuff. It took me three, plus a few extra days when I learned about a new need and a new capability.
All SpinoffCompany has going for it technically is TechSupportGuy. Everything else is ParentCompany's programmers and tech people. They apparently have no time, so while I've been meeting with them and getting nods and smiles and promises of "we can get you that," I didn't actually get anything from them... every time there was a promise of, "we can do that," it was followed up by me coming up with a new way to not need that, or cover it myself. Bottom line is I own this project, the whole thing. Its the first time in my life I've been put in a position where I felt like I was free to take complete control of something, and I stepped in and did it.
TechSupportGuy came back from BoraBora. He was a little miffed at first to find the replacement he'd hired as a temp, and maybe had some visions of hiring on so he could do something more interesting than tech support, is now the one doing the more interesting things. I wouldn't say I'm his boss, but that's only because I have an extremely conservative view of proper relationships -- the same thing that's stopped me from taking complete control of anything before, because I always had a boss who's job I figured that was. Yes, I realize that's Wrong. Anyhow, I'll be working with him a lot, I'm going to try to use him to do parts of the new system. I asked him what programming languages he knows, since I knwo he wanted to be the one to work on the new stuff, I thought I could let him work on it with me. His reply was something along the lines of, "HTML, javascript..." blah blah blah. Funny story, but perfect for my needs; my "graphical interface" skills are weak. I can use an HTML table, and that's about as far as I go. So I can use him to do that, I've seen his presentations and they're very pretty. I'm a little scared it'll be some mess of generated HTML like you get from Save as HTML in Word, though... if it is, I don't knwo what I'll do. This interim solution only required a programmer's interface, no HTML involved. ... anyhow:
At the same time he came back, I got hired on as a regular employee. My title is to be pretty much anything I like, I assume -- I never asked for a title at my last job and wound up with "Senior Programmer." I imagine it'll end up similar here, though the things I've handled so far and probably will handle into the forseeable future are a lot more diverse than that.
Especially Linux systems administration. I can't bring myself to run a corporate system on Windows, for reasons I'm all to happy to discuss with anyone who wants to get into that, but this post is definately long enough already, and I'm only feeling about 3/4ths of the way done. Consider it my JREF fix, I haven't been around enough lately. Anyhow, my point was, all their systems are Windows, and I think that's rotten. I can show them ways it has cost them already, many ways. Fortunately, the guy at ParentCompany I had to pitch all my ideas to initially is cool with Linux, and so now they have their first Linux box. It may become a BSD box when I have nore time to make such considerations. Input is welcome. I'm running Debian on it, this time for mainly philosophical reasons. ParentCompany wouldn't bat an eye at paying Redhat's extortionistic fees for RedHat ES(*), but I wouldn't sleep as well at night knowing I'd bowed down to -The Man-. Similar for SuSe. Debian gives the Eric S Raymond in me tingles, and still gets a fair amount of corporate support, so I went with it.
(*"Need a place to host your system, Scribble? ParentCompany figured we would and bought a hosting company. Go meet them and find out what they need to do for you." Okay, it didn't happen exactly like that, but close. They bought the hosting company for a few other reasons primarily, which is good, because I don't think it's suited to our system long term.)
Boss asked me to name my salary when TechGuy came back and my "contract" with them was up. I told him a low number now, ad a high number later. We've just released the "interim" version of my software last week, and my plan for the complete solution is rougyl six months, plus continuing work as needs arise. There's plenty of other things they need a programmer for, too. I feel guilty asking for a lot of money before I've done anything for them, though, when TechGuy came back it was still a week or so to the release of my interim version, so they hadn't really seen anything yt, just had a ton of faith in me. In my opinion, a progrmamer like my boss at ExCompany would have done it in a week or less, and it took me closer to a month, so I didn't feel that a week's work was enough to judge me by, either, but when the full thing is good, then they'll know what I'm truly worth. So, low number now and high number later, I said.
Boss liked low number. Boss liked highnumber. Boss liked the plan. He wondered if I'd like to become a shareholder, too. He thought with lownumber and the work I'd done (which he hadn't even seen yet!!) they would want me to have a real investment in the company. The shareholders had a meeting a week later, where I'm told the VP stood up and said "Scribble has managed to do in three weeks what our people didn't do in two years." How could I lose?
Now boss only had time to give me tht quote, promise to talk to me more later, and take off to meet a client or something across the country until next week. So I'm still kind of in limbo as far as the bigger picture goes, but honestly, my main motivation at this point is how freaking fun it is to design this system from the ground up, in a way that's truly smart (as far as I'm concerned, anyhow.) It's sometihng I can be proud of all on my own, unlike at ExCompany where the best I could do was say, "Yeah, I wrote that part." And "That part" was usually just some add on module, not the core logic. though I had to modify plenty of the core logic along the way at Excompany, the framework was all in place before I got there. PLus, compared to the systems SpinoffCompany and ParentCompany have been using at many levels, I can't help but do better. Many of these systems have been contracted out to programming firms, and their work is crap. I dont' think of myself as a great programmer even now, but lately I've been thinking I'm better than I thought. If that made sense. Heh!
And once we get some real clients on it this week, I'll know how good I am. All my testing indicates I'm smart enough, but then my skeptical nature will only trust the real deal. If it turns out I've done as well as I've come to think I have, I won't have to worry about asking for high number later. I'll be able to get it anywhere.
So thanks for listening. Yes, I'm still alive. Just busy. Still plenty to do, too! It feels wonderful to be working at a place where I'm appreciated; where they've needed someone just like me for so long and been hurting so badly for lack of it. And with the system being all mine, I'm usually more interested in making it better than debating philosophy lately. Perhaps when it starts to look really good I'll be around more, about six months. Till then, I won't be a total stranger.
I think I understood most of that!
