I love it.

Like, if I could go back to the point where I was like “Hmm, should I take this job?” I would just shake myself and yell “YES, YOU IDIOT, TAKE IT!”

I mean, it’s not perfect, but nothing is, but I’m so much happier now.  I wasn’t unhappy most of the time before but now it’s like… every day we usually laugh a bunch and joke around, we throw nerf balls at each other, my boss tries to hit nerf golf balls at my head from across the room and we go out to lunch together.  I genuinely like everyone that I interact with on a regular basis.

And the workflow system is so awesome.  We commit to what we think we can handle, and how long we think it’ll take and we go into work and get our work done but don’t stress out about it.    And I mean, I feel productive BECAUSE I’m not stressed out and I’m happy.

And we hang out outside of work, too.  Last week we had Game Night where we all brought in our Xbox360s and played Call of Duty (I was terrible, it was my first time playing, but it was fun) and then we did some Rock Band.  The next night we went to Top Golf and I didn’t play but we had a lot of fun hanging out and everyone else really enjoyed playing.

Today was my birthday.  I walked in and our office manager had bought me a balloon and left candy on my desk.  Everyone in the office wished me happy birthday at least once.  My boss took me and my co-worker out to lunch and we had a great conversation about the company.  Then we had my favorite cake and everyone again wished me happy birthday.  Then, as I was leaving, our entire room again wished me happy birthday.  We did birthdays at my old office and that was nice, too, but everyone was so awesome to me all day it was just like, it made my birthday something special.

I also have a new teammate and I really like him.  He’s only been there a week and he’s really taking the time out to teach me stuff I’ve always wanted to learn.  I was a little worried when he first started that he was going to make me redundant or something but he’s a really nice guy and really smart and is like, interested in helping me out, finally giving me training that I’ve been begging for for like 10 years already.

The environment is really nice, too.  The people I need to ask questions to are very cool, and I feel like I’m doing a good job learning things and making suggestions, picking up responsibilities etc.  I’ve been entrusted with a few new things already and have some realistic goals.  I’ve never been afraid of asking a question or not knowing something.

Still the worst thing is how much it lengthened my commute but that’s such a minor thing.  The open room still has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  But I’m so much better off financially and mentally now, it’s awesome.  I really do miss a lot of the people at my old job and there’s aspects of the work I miss, but it’s worth it being where I am now.

I wish I could make Bioware know exactly how much I loved 99% of Mass Effect 3.  I want them to know how much I laughed and squealed with joy at so many things.  How much I clapped and shouted YES! and cursed at the bad guys and sat on the edge of my chair giggling with glee over so many things.

I wish Bioware knew how scared I was when Kaidan got pounded up against that shuttle over and over again.  How I welled up with tears seeing him unconscious and not knowing if he was going to make it. The goofy grin I had when he said he wasn’t seeing anyone and he still cared.  The out of control giggling at the little date on the Citadel.  How much I looked forward to each conversation with him and the rest of the crew after every mission.  How hot that scene, you know, THAT scene right before Horizon was.  How absolutely FLOORED I was when Kaidan got to see the truth of the Lazarus project and finally came to terms with what happened to my Shepard, something I NEVER thought they’d do.

I wish I could make sure Bioware knew how completely they broke my heart when Kaidan and Shepard said their goodbyes on London.  That feeling of “I love you but I know I’ll never see you again, even though there’s hope.”  Been there, done that, they tore open an old wound for me, rubbed salt in it, and it was glorious.

And I could go on and on, not just the things with Kaidan.  The warm feelings of getting most of my old team back together, getting to know the new guys, running into so many characters I loved and missed.  Time and again they hit the right notes.

Running up and down Tuchanka like a madman, giggling and cursing, (my pets thought I was insane) dodging that reaper beam and cheering like an idiot while the Thresher Maw took out the reaper.  Weeping into my hands when Mordin sacrificed himself.  Screaming in frustration when I left Thane, dying on the ground and five minutes later broken down in tears at his final prayer.  The frustration of dodging that reaper beam on Rannoch and the triumph of finally beating that damn thing.  A hundred other moments like that.

I wish Bioware could see the texts and Tweets I traded with my friends about it those first few days.  I wish they could have heard Impsy and I talking to each other on our Xbox headsets that first night of release when we played through Mars, blurting out our uncontained excitement, observations and feelings.  I wish I could tell everyone at Bioware what an awesome job they did for so much of the game.

What I’m trying to say is, Mass Effect 3 made me feel more than I’ve felt in a long, long time.  Not to say that I don’t ordinarily have emotions, but it was like around every corner was a new emotional experience.  Playing it left me exhausted, both from lack of sleep and from the… rollercoaster doesn’t even begin to describe the emotions it put me through. It was the best gaming experience I’ve ever had.

So many times I just thought “This game is perfection.  It’s everything I ever wanted Mass Effect 3 to be, and some things I only ever hoped it would be but didn’t think it would be.”  I had a teensy complaint here and there  but overall, up until the last five minutes, I honestly can’t praise the game enough, and there’s so much to go back and see and do that I can’t wait.

And then the last five minutes happened.

Now, I knew going into it, it was going to be bad.  I had to work full time so I didn’t get to the ending til Sunday night, well after most of my friends had beaten it and had started to warn me.  I somehow managed to stay unspoiled as to WHAT happens in the ending, just that it wasn’t good.  Impsy started to prepare me, and when SHE told me it was bad, I knew I’d better hold on.

Because, tbqh, if you’d have asked me two weeks ago if I was a BioDrone (the derogatory name for people who love and defend Bioware, refusing to think the company could do any wrong) I’d probably have said “Haha yes.”  I liked Dragon Age 2 just fine, didn’t think it was as good as DA1 and I got what people didn’t like about it and had some of the same complaints, but overall I didn’t think it was a bad game  The DLC controversy just made me roll my eyes.  I bought two copies of ME3, one for 360 and a CE for PC on at release just so I could multiplayer with my 360 friends.  (In fact, I own all 3 ME games on both platforms).  To me, they could do no wrong, and I knew Impsy felt the same way.  I’d heard murmurings about the endings before release and rolled my eyes, surely it was just malcontents who’d never be happy with ANYTHING flapping their gums.

I like to like things!  I liked the endings to both Battlestar Galactica and Lost just fine!  I hate it when people go around griping and hating everything!  Some people just can’t be made happy no matter what, ya know?  This is Bioware you guys.  This is Mass Effect!  Of course it’s going to be perfect and awesome!  Impsy and I both kind of brushed off the unhappy murmurings and kept looking towards release date with nothing but eagerness and positivity.

But when she came to me and said it was bad, I knew it had to be bad.  I knew she’d stayed even more spoiler-free than I had going into ME3 (and we’d both done our bet) and when she told me she’d finished and I had to start bracing myself, I thought I was going in prepared.

I wasn’t.

It took a minute, once it was done and the credits started rolling for it to really sink in.  Impsy started laying out the implications of what we’d just seen.  The Mass Relays gone.  Tens of thousands of Aliens stranded on a burnt-out Earth.  No food for turians and quarians.

And why the FUCK did Joker run away?  There’s no way he would ever run away.  And not with Kaidan and Garrus.  Kaidan, who loved my Shepard and had already lost her once, would never leave her behind.  And Garrus had always been by her side, loyalty never wavering one bit.  And Joker’s bravery was every bit as sharp as his wit.  There’s no way they’d leave, but there they’d been going through a Mass Relay for no reason, and now they were stranded on some jungle planet who knows how far away, so even if Shepard lived, she’d nveer see them again.

I could sit here and type out all the ways the last five minutes are terrible, but it’s been done before, much better than I could do it.

By Gamefront.

By this guy you YouTube.

By this guy on Bioware Social Network.

And tonight I even saw the following quote which sums it up so very well:

“I read one recent blog post where the writer basically said “the ending was awesome because it was just like a movie” and I think she was missing the point.

It is a game. Not a movie.

And more specifically, its a role-playing game. The players are *part* of the game. Part of the process of building and experiencing the game, much more so than with most other forms of entertainment.

Entitlement is really a right, for the gamer, because they have participated, actively, in the game itself.

Again, I can’t speak to the actual ending myself, because I have not played it but in generally I’d say a Role-Playing Video Game Trilogy Ending should (try to) do the following:

1. Reward the player’s choices throughout the series. The big stuff they did should be noted. They should *feel* like they had a unique impact on the world.

2. End on a positive note. This is really important for video games… life in general is full of shitty stuff happening all the time. When I invest a hundred hours into a game I need to walk away feeling like a hero.

When you waste a couple hours of a person’s life with an artsy/depressing movie or short story or even a novel, it is more forgivable because the time spent is less. And presumably the consumer knew what they were going into when they started. Certain directors create certain styles of movie. Certain writers write specific types of fiction.

On the other hand somebody playing an epic role-playing video-game trilogy is going to *expect* to be the hero and save the universe. That’s why they are playing the game. When expectations don’t match reality, disappointment is created.

It might be an artistic/creative move to go with a different style of ending but I feel its the wrong choice, especially for a videogame *trilogy*. Make your middle game bleak if you want to, but end the series on a high note.

— Brent Knowles, former lead designer/creative director of BioWare

When it comes down to it, I think maybe that’s the reason why the last five minutes hurt so much.  Because if you’ve played all 3 games through once, with any sort of even mostly completionist way, you’ve spent at least 100 hours of your life on the game, with those characters.

I’ve played through ME1 about a dozen times, and ME2 6 times completely, 3 or 4 more halfway through or more.  I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on masseffectsaves/masseffect2saves.com.  I’ve been Bioware Tech Support hundreds of times without them knowing, for almost free.  I’ve put more work and time into these games personally than I have into many things in my life.

We LOVE these characters.  We love the universe.  We love the way we’ve been allowed to sculpt the world.  We love all the emotion we’ve felt because of the games.  We love being able to discuss what happens in MY game that didn’t happen in YOUR game.  We love feeling that the avatar on the screen isn’t just “Commander Shepard” but MY Shepard.  Her looks, personality and circumstances were forged by us, individually.

There are many Shepards, but this one is mine.

And the ending takes away everything that we loved.  It takes away our freedom of choice.  It takes away Shepard’s sovereignty.  It takes away her (or his) personality.  It takes our best friends and lover away, turns them into cowards, and strands them far away where they’ll never see Shepard again, even if she manages to survive, which, mostly, she won’t.  It takes every person on the Citadel we ever helped, or persuaded and sacrifices them.  It takes every alliance we ever forged and turned those people into starving savages as bad off as the drell before the hanar, but with no hope of rescue.

Because they ARE the ONLY rescue left in the entire damn galaxy, and they’re stranded themselves.  The nearest help is 100 light years away, if they’re lucky.

There is no triumph and no victory at the end of ME3.  Everything we’ve ever been told in 100+ hours of gaming – that hard work, sacrifices, never taking “impossible” for an answer and finding your own path – is a lie.  It snatches victory away from us, any hope we might have had for some amount of joy for our commander Shepard, is out of reach.

We worked one hundred hours to be told to fuck off, life isn’t fair, and neither are the worlds we choose to spend our time and money in when we want to escape from real life.  That despair is the norm and nothing we do actually matters.

And since playing ME3 I’ve started to wonder if my own work for the ME fandom matters.

I don’t know.  It’s late, I’ve barely slept in days (Not entirely because of ME3, but it hasn’t helped.)  My faith in Bioware is shattered, I don’t know if I’ll ever buy another Bioware product if they don’t handle this carefully, if they don’t truly listen to what their fans are saying, listen to Brent Knowles, the guys at Gamefront and the screenwriter on BSN.  If they can’t acknowledge they understand the true reasons why we’re mad and address some way to fix things, I know they won’t be getting any more of my money.

Can barely keep my eyes open.

More tomorrow.

So two weeks later, I’m starting to get settled in.  I know almost everyone’s names, and there are a few things I can do on my own.  I’ve also written some documentation, which I continue to improve and tweak and yesterday I was told I would be getting the vendor relations task, which basically means handling all the ordering for IT, getting prices, and making sure what gets shipped to us is what we ordered, that kind of thing.  I’ve done it before, so it’s not a big deal.  It was nice to see my boss is already trusting me with bigger stuff, though.

I’ve also done my best to socialize with everyone.  We go out to eat for lunch together a lot and I know it’s vital to have my co-workers feel comfortable around me, especially with how there’s not very many women.  The first time we went out after my first day, the other woman in the room with me came, which was great, and since then it’s been just me and various combinations of the guys.  But it’s good, I feel like I’m starting to fit in.

Also, the other woman in the room IM’d me late last week and we talked about setting up a girl’s lunch day sometime this week or next with just the 5 women in the office. That should be cool.  I got to talk at some length with the other woman that works closely with our teams last week which was great, as well.  Oh and today we’re having a goodbye lunch for someone leaving and a hello lunch for someone who just started (so I’m not the newbie anymore, yay!)

Oh, also I posted a couple of pictures.  This is my desk and this is my view from my desk.  There are three desks to my left you can’t see and another few to the right.  I have it situated better now that you can’t see my big monitor.  I’d still rather have an office, but it’s not that bad.

Yesterday was the first day where things really sucked, and that was only about an hour when a whole bunch of people were asking me to do things and Eric wasn’t here yet, and a server needed attention that I only half knew how to do.  It all turned out okay.  Today Eric’s not here, nor the guy who used to do my job so um, it’ll be interesting.  So far it’s been fairly quiet, at least.

On the Mass Effect front, things are going well.  Hits are about where I’d expect them to be and the only problem is that there’s more work there to do than I have time for with answering emails and keeping up with news. We’re getting a steady stream of 2-5 new saves a day and almost all the major choices are covered.  It’s so much less stressful this time than when ME3 was released because of the database and not doing everything by hand, yay.

Last week Patrick from Giantbomb contacted me and I’ve been answering questions for him about the sites.  So hopefully sometime this week something about masseffectsaves/masseffect2saves.com will be up on Giantbomb!  When the first site went live two years ago I got a lot of unexpected media mentions, which was so awesome. Having Penny Arcade talk about the site was a huge, huge thrill for me especially.  I honestly nearly passed out and had to grip my desk and take huge gulps of air when I saw it.  And g4tv.com, Rock Paper Shotgun and Evil Avatar amongst other places was great.  Also this year so far the Rebel FM podcast mentioned the site.  But nobody’s ever come to ask me questions before so, I’m excited to see how it comes out.

And I’m just SO excited about ME3 in general.  It’s hard to contain my excitement and my co-workers might think I’m some kind of a freak a little bit now since I’m basically always wearing my N7 hoodie.  I’m going to ask my boss today if I can have next Wednesday off, I think.  I can totally understand if he says no since I’m still new here, but I’m hoping he’ll let me because I NEED a day to play ME3 so I don’t get spoiled too badly.  I ordered the CE on Amazon so it should be delivered to the office sometime that day, so I’ll go home and play til I pass out.

When ME2 was released, I was still doing all the site updates by hand, so I took 2 days off work (Wed and Thurs) to play it and COULDN’T because Penny Arcade mentioned me that day so I got a HUGE flood of new saves to put up and THE INTERNET NEEDED ME (not really, but that’s how I felt) so I spent like 70% of the 2 days working on the site and played for like 6 hours instead.  It took like almost 3 weeks for me to finish the game (though I do tend to try to do completionist runs my first time through any game) because I would get home from work, spend 2 hours on the site, then play.  Then usually another hour before bed.

You can’t even imagine how happy I was once Sporkley did the database and we had everything imported so site updates meant just reading things, making minor corrections and changing a 0 to a 1 and hitting save.

Anyway, mah BFF Impsy and I have been playing tons of multiplayer! I can’t believe how much fun we’re having with just two maps and half the race/class combos.  It’s going to be NUTS when the real thing comes out.

My big problem though is that most of my friends play on 360 and I’m a PC player.  I have a feeling I’m going to end up getting ME3 on 360 and transfer at least one of my Shepards over to 360 so I can Multiplayer it up with my friends.

Back to work now!

What I did do was get an early access code to the Mass Effect 3 Demo and played that a couple of times, and took some long naps.  I could say a lot about the ME3 demo, but let’s just say the Kaidan fangirl in me was very happy and seeing so many old friends was awesome.  For the last year or so I’ve basically kept away from all things Mass Effect as much as possible because I love that game so much that I didn’t want to get excited for the release until it was almost here.  So now that we’re a month away I’m in full-on Mass Effect mode again.

Anyway, so last night I was fairly worried about missing my FIRST DAY AT WORK from being sick.  So I went to bed early and woke up feeling… meh but like I could go.  I armed myself with hand sanitizer, a box of Kleenex and a bottle of water and went in.

I was slightly worried for a few minutes that something would go horribly wrong since it was raining, traffic sucked and I missed my exit (sort of), and then my phone was having issues when I wanted to check the address, but in the end, I made it to work okay.

I had to kind of wait for Eric to get there to do much of anything useful but he’d set up my computer to only have OS/10 on it and showed me how to install Bootcamp to dual boot to Windows 7.  Now, I haven’t touched a mac in a long time.  We had an iMac for awhile at my old job which we booted up once every few months to do one thing on and shut it back off.   I’m not sure I even ever used it.  Before that back in ’96 I checked my email on a very old mac (it still had a black and white monitor) for one summer.  Before that, I used an Apple IIe quite a bit in elementary school.

I have had two ipods though and used iTunes so um.. yeah there’s my Mac experience.  I’m going to have to learn OS/10 and the inner workings of a Mac (which I can’t imagine are too far removed from a PC, which I can put together from ordering all the parts off Newegg in about an hour.

So basically a lot of today was learning things by doing them for myself, they purposely didn’t set me up much ahead of time because setting up new users will be one of my new responsibilities.  I got to know the mail service, and did a lot of stuff I already knew like the fresh Win7 install, updates, Office etc.  Had a minor problem with my TechNet subscription but called tech support and hopefully that’ll be fixed tomorrow.

Went to a team meeting in the morning that I was pretty lost on, my whole job was to wave and say hi and I tried to spend the rest of the time figuring out what everyone else was talking about.

I should also point out the structure of the new office.  All of development and IT, around 15 people, is in one big room.  We all have nice big half-moon shaped desks and a rolling filing cabinet/desk drawer with padding on top so someone can use it as a chair when they come to your desk.  Also super nice expensive chairs (I miss my chair from my old job, though.)  My desk is in a corner (sort of, its more like the room just juts in suddenly and keeps going, but there’s privacy enough, only one guy can see one of my screens I think, and that’s fine with me.)  The bosses have offices but their doors look like they’re always or at least usually open.  There’s also a separate conference room.  And a kitchen, stocked with drinks and maybe snacks, not sure on the snacks, but I did get a fresh bottle of water from there in the afternoon.

Also, I may be the only woman in the entire room.  There’s one desk that was unoccupied today that looked like maybe a female sat there normally and I did hear someone say someone named Danielle I think was out today so, I may not be totally alone.  Another woman named Amber came by to see me and said it was great to have more women in the office.

I miss my office, but I’ve only had it back for a month when I left, anyway.  I can see some advantages of having it like that but it did get kind of noisy at the beginning and end of the day.  The middle was pretty quiet.

The boss took me, Eric and another guy out to lunch and that was great!  It was a good welcome to the team.  In the afternoon we had another meeting and I did more installation stuff and filled out paperwork.

A lot of paperwork.

My hand still hurts from all the paperwork.

All insurance stuff, and the healtcare plan and all looks really good. There’s some stuff I don’t understand that I’m going to call and talk to someone in finance with tomorrow.

So, I’m not sure if I mentioned this before and I’m too lazy to go look, but I have this job because a former co-worker, Eric, emailed me and asked me if I wanted it.  Eric and I worked together for over 5 years after I started work at my old company and he is without a doubt one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked with.  And realize that I had great relationships with like, most of the people I’ve ever worked with.  But Eric and I worked closely together and he’s pretty introverted and I can see why some people wouldn’t “get” him but we always got along great.  When he left I honestly missed him quite a bit and we always kept in touch a bit via facebook and stuff.

So working alongside him today was just like… nothing had really changed and it was 6 or so years ago again.  And it was awesome.  We have basically the same positions relative to each other work-wise now as we did way back when.  And when he was leaving for the day and grabbed his stuff and told me to go home I was like… Okay.  This is good.  It feels like someday this place could be as comfortable to me again as our old place was.

Also amusing… it was after 10am before I logged onto IM and as soon as I did my 3 closest co-workers at the old job immediately IMd me to ask how it was going, and one of them needed me to tell them how to do something.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to go back to the old job at night for an hour or two to make sure things are progressing smoothly.  I might just call my old boss and ask him to check to see if that’s necessary.  I did sign the paperwork to stay on as a consultant before I left, but I don’t want to just go back there just to go.  I think it’s too early for things to have gone to hell.  Yet.

Hopefully they’ll find someone to replace me soon so I can just spend a few hours training them, grab a few hundred bucks in extra pay and be done there completely.

My memory of the day is kind of a blur because I started getting sick Thursday night.  Friday I was just trying to make it through without passing out sometimes.

I spent the morning just trying to catch up on what needed to be caught up on, though I had a meeting with my boss in there, too, and a few people came by to say goodbye.

I got taken out to lunch with 6 of my co-workers.  We went to TGIFridays. The service was slow, the food was cold and the waitress was surly.  Ah well.

That afternoon was another blur.  Another meeting with my boss, then the exit interview where I signed a bunch of papers and spoke my mind on the company, on the record, about what I loved and what needed to be improved, and what I felt they were doing blatantly wrong.  There was nothing scathing, but a few things that felt good to be honest about that I’d kept to myself for a long time. And, I cried, because that place has been a part of my life for 11.5 years and it is a little hard to let go, especially when I’ve been mostly happy there.

Back to my office and I’d missed saying goodbye to Matt, which made me sad.  Sent out a goodbye email, got a lot of lovely replies and a few more people came by to say goodbye and give me hugs.

Including the CEO.

I spoke honestly to him then, too, but generally positively.  Made sure he understood my reasons for leaving, made sure he knew that I really liked both my boss and the CIO, who are by bosses (other than him obviously).  He told me that it stung that I’m leaving but he understands.  There may have been a tear or two and I swear his eyes got watery too.

One last meeting with my boss and they decided to ask me to stay on to consult when necessary.  I got the low end of what I wanted, but it was still more than my normal rate of my salary after taxes.  Back to Dean’s to fill out consultant paperwork, back to my office to finish cleaning it out, and I left by 6pm.

I’ll be back now and then for the next few weeks so it wasn’t really truly goodbye but it was much more goodbye than it’s ever been before.

At the same time, I’m excited.  Honestly I was more excited than sad, but the sad was there since it’s a very long chapter in my life closing.

But, as my current boss is so fond of saying, onward and upwards.  I’m gonna miss that guy.

Typically, there are huge emergencies and problems with a major client.  I haven’t been dragged into it yet, though.

Also, I’m sick…ish.  Congested, runny nose, slightly sore throat.  If this were a normal non-quitting day, I’d have stayed home in bed.  But, there’s too much to do.  Gotta clean out my office, fill out some paperwork, exit interview, they’re supposedly taking me out to lunch, say goodbye to people, possibly negotiate a contract salary if they want to keep me on for a bit (and after yesterday, I think they will), and other stuff.  Except for housecleaning I’m probably going to stay home all weekend and rest.

Other than that, I’m feeling… okay.  Kind of sad.  Kind of excited.  Kind of nervous.  And I didn’t sleep much last night so in addition to the sick, I am also tired.

I’m sure there will be tears later on today.  I really love most of the people I work with, and some of them have been here almost as long as I have.  The person who’s been here longer than me’s wife had a baby yesterday so he won’t be here, which is sad but the baby was a preemie and is in NICU atm, but should be fine.

But it’s weird, knowing that people who have been in your everyday life for 1 to 11 years aren’t going to be anymore.

I even went to Starbuck’s this morning to get my occasional drink (tall hot chocolate with a half shot of espresso) to say goodbye to my favorite barista.

Cutting the sadness a bit is the anticipation of the FemShepFriday trailer, and whatever else Bioware might have in store for us on FemShepFriday!

True story: I have loved Bioware since Baldur’s Gate, but when they started doing press and stuff for Mass Effect I spent quite a few hours trying to just answer the “Can you play as a female!?” question and never found an answer, so I figured, no, and became disinterested in the game.  I ended up not playing it until it had been out for two years, and even then, begrudgingly because I thought I’d have to play a dude.  And I bought it on sale for like $10 instead of brand new on release day like I usually do with Bioware games.

As soon as I loaded up the game and saw, oh hey, you CAN play as a female, I just started wondering WHY was that answer almost impossible to find when they were marketing the game?  Once I started playing, I was instantly in love with the game and I’ve played ME1 at least a dozen times and ME2 eight times all the way through.  I’m so glad Bioware is finally giving FemShep and Jennifer Hale the recognition she so richly deserves.

Anyway, it’s my last day of work.  I should go do some work, I suppose. 

Work is… wow.  These are my last official days with my current company.  They are NOT EVEN CLOSE to being ready for me to leave.  It’s kind of the thing where you really don’t realize how much you’re involved until you try not to be? There’s so much to get done and so many things to pass on and so much I really, really need to do and only 16 hours left to do it in.  It’s scary.  I’ve offered to stay on as a consultant for awhile. I partially hope they don’t take the offer up because I don’t want to work EVEN MORE.  OTOH, the money would be nice and being able make sure things go well after I’m gone would be nicer.

I know I shouldn’t care as much as I do, but I’m the only person who’s ever done this job.  It was created, I was handed it and I’ve been running with it for 9 years.  I know all the ins and outs and ups and downs and as good as my documentation is, there’s nothing like experience.  I know I’m moving on to bigger and better things but a part of me is still clinging very tightly. I hope I can let go.

OK so next, Sporkley and I worked yesterday a lot on masseffect2saves.com (and the main site, too.)  And everything is up and running well and we’re very happy.

Then, I discovered some asshole stole all the content on ME2saves and created his own shitty knockoff site and has been going around not saying he’s me but not saying he’s not, either.  So now I’m dealing with DMCA takedown notices and stuff.  WHY do people do this stuff?

I mean, I’ll be honest, the sites basically make enough to support themselves for hosting, domain registration and bandwith/space costs, I pay Sporkley a % of the revenue from ads and basically I have about enough money left over to eat out at Chili’s once every couple of months.  This is not big bucks.  This is a labor of love.  I make way below minimum for my work and I’m completely ok with that.  But all of the work is MY and Sporkley’s work.    My idea for the sites.  My upkeep, Sporkley’s coding and Joakim’s web design, which, thankfully, was not stolen.

It’s just a pain in the ass and is kind of souring my anticipation for ME3.  And now I had to go create Facebook and Google+ pages for it to make it clear these sites are mine, not shittyspammerdude’s.  The buttons are ugly and cluttering up the already kind of cluttered front pages.

And last, mom and I went on vacation last week, on a cruise on the Disney Wonder and that kicked all sorts of ass.  I highly recommend Disney cruises, even if you don’t have kids.  And yes, I travel with my mom a lot.  We’re very close and make good travelling companions.  However, it’s good to be home.  I’m just kind of wishing it was next week at this point.

Better yet, March 6th.

The biggest one is, after 11.5 years working for the same company, yesterday I turned in my three weeks notice.  I gave them an extra week for various reasons, including the fact that nobody in the company knows how to do my job except for me so training my replacement will be… fun.

I’m starting a new job with an old co-worker on February 13th.  The last time I started a new job was August 20th, 2000.

I love my company, I wouldn’t stay here and through all the BS I’ve been through here if I didn’t.  I’ve watched this company grow from a dozen people when I started to an industry leader with almost 70 employees now.

There’s still one other person who’s been here longer than me.  He’s the guy who interviewed me, recommended I get hired and, well, he’s a friend.

I’m scared, and nervous, but really excited about the new job.

I hate (and love, a little bit) the way the few people who know so far look at me now.  I feel like a traitor, and yet I feel very strongly this was the right thing for me to do.  Because I’ve been stuck in a rut for like, 8 years I’d say.  Even though things have gotten so much better for me the last year here at work I feel like, if I don’t change now, I may never get out.  I may be 60 someday still working here doing the same job.  And honestly, that wouldn’t be the worst thing.  I do like it here, I like my co-workers and i like the work.  But at the same time, this is all I’ve known, since my mid-20′s.  This is the only professional job I’ve ever had.  I’ve done call centers and such before I got this job, but this is the first career job I’ve had.  And something in me is saying “don’t let it be the only one.

So here I’ll document the change, for one thing.  And the other changes I’m making in my life.