I should be scaling back, not escalating

Spent much of the past work-week buried in documentation. As it turns out, there are a lot of routine-to-me tasks that my co-workers haven’t performed in a long time, if ever. I’ll probably be spending my last week at the old job madly scribbling notes on how things should work.

Surprisingly, there has been no official internal announcement of my departure. (Granted, it’s budget season, so my boss has been busy haranguing people about allocating enough money for I.T.) Instead, the rumor mill has fired up. So far the rumors aren’t very far-fetched (dammit), but they do lack lots of important details like when I’m leaving and where I’m going to be working instead.

Allegedly, there’s a happy hour or something in the works. Yeah, fine. I can never argue free beer at the Tap Room, especially this time of year, but the whole “happy hour” thing might be a bit much. Honestly, lots of my users dislike me because I don’t allow them to e-mail that cute 17MB video of the babies in costume to all 400 of their closest friends. (I know, only an insensitive asshole wants to keep the network infrastructure available for actual work.) Also, I’m not a big fan of cheesy schwag, and I probably won’t have a place to put all of it at the new job.

Finally on that front, it looks like they may be hiring two new people in the department to handle my job. Ha! I did the work of TWO PEOPLE for years and years!

***

Had finals in my philosophy class and programming logic class. Both were easier than I had expected, though the philosophy final was a bit compressed by a server outage. (Final started 17:30; server died at 16:55. ack!)

***

Went to my first rugby practice on Thursday night after the second final! The coaching staff was a bit pre-occupied by preparing for a weekend match, but the players themselves were extraordinarily helpful and friendly, even while attempting to run plays.

Started off running a pick-up touch game, then followed it up with stretchy sort-of-calisthenics and a running/passing drill. The major problem I had in the running/passing drill is that the guy I was paired with was blazing fast — I am not blazing fast — and that I’d rarely get to the ball in time to, y’know, catch it. I’d like to think I did pretty well when I did catch it, though.

Afterwards they split into forwards and backs. I got sent along with the backs and received basic backfield wisdom from a lanky young wing with the Ur-scruff and a cloud of coachly disfavor (since he had done something foolish in their last match). Ran a bit more, then ran some more, then ran some more. And ran.

Eventually the A-side and B-side scrummaged against each other. I hung out on the sidelines so that the different squads could practice together, and in the process chatted with a few subs, newbies, and veterans. Passed the ball around a bit, too.

By this point it was getting pretty late, so the coach invited everyone to a bar nearby for a glass of water “or something, haha”. I begged off — between a long day at work and a final and a small lunch and no dinner I was wiped — and came home.

Fiercely sore on Friday, especially in the adductors, hamstrings, and mid-section. That has mostly resolved itself, though.

I cannot wait until I can attend another practice, perhaps this coming Thursday…

***

Adding a couple new categories: Work, School, and Rugby. Over the next day or so I’ll be perusing archives and adding posts to the relevant new categories.

I’m also kindasorta thinking of upgrading to the new version of WordPress, though I think I’ll hold off for a couple days there.