Thursday I signed the acceptance letter of the job I hinted at in February’s last post, my official start date is the beginning of next month.

My initial intent was to make a post that is a laundry list of the things I am never going to have to do again, but when I start one it is harder to write than it seems like it should be. It is beginning to sink in slowly just how different my life is about to become, but the difficulty I have in making that list says to me that I really don’t understand yet. After years and years of being on-call most of the time, I have acclimated emotionally and mentally to being restricted in the things I can do after hours and on the weekends. I recognize that it is a fact that I could get in my car and spend the weekend somewhere else entirely, but I somehow don’t believe or comprehend that that fact is going to be true almost every weekend for the foreseeable future. Add to that the idea that I’ve spent almost the last 8 years of my life implementing and supporting computer systems of different sorts, and while I am certainly horrifically sick of that and ready to do something else, I don’t know that I can really imagine what doing something else full-time is going to be like. I don’t mind the travelling that I’ve done, but travelling 1/4th of my time, especially to the middle-of-nowhere places that my company owns hospitals in, might end up being less than ideally exciting. I’ll probably also net less money this year than I would’ve otherwise, but I thought I’d give this work-life balance thing that others seem to have a shot, at very least because it will give me a better chance at getting the other things done that I need to be doing.

Here’s an attempt at the list anyway, because I think the exercise is probably a good one for me:

• No more being responsible for fixing things that I am powerless to actually influence or fix.
• No more having to reverse engineer why a system is broken without documentation or support from the vendor (or anyone, really).
• No more endless fighting with vendors because their systems are broken and they know it is easier to blame us than to take responsibility.
• No more being woken up in the middle of the night over stupid shit (or any shit at all).
• No more having to rebuild servers because they are so old that they have rusted to the point where they’ve stopped working.
• No more having to explain to people that don’t really understand what a network is, that our network is functioning perfectly and they need to look elsewhere for their problems, and then having to repeat that to them the next week, and the next month, and forever.
• No more fucking printers ever again for any reason at all.
• No more endless parade of dying UPSs taking down entire sections of our network in the middle of the night.
• No more spending my nights and weekends fixing things that people were too incompetent to fix during daytime hours.

Apparently it was time for me to find something else to do, making this list is just activating my almost bottomless bitterness and resentment that I feel about many of these issues.

I will however, miss the total catastrophes, I always did love it best when all of the shit hit the fan at the same time (at least the ones that don’t involve issues with computer systems while patients are cut open on operating tables).

Here’s hoping.