This week, a new job

Yep, I've done it again. In fifteen years since I got my first full-time job, I started my eighth one. I just couldn't resist...a job within a long's walk came up, and with the potential for $4 per gallon gas prices this year, this old economics student opted to change. It wasn't hasty, mind you. I'd been contemplating it for a while. Inflation of costs and deflation of my savings account made me look long and hard. A three percent raise just doesn't go as far as it used to go.

Right now, it's been interesting working in the service of the Government. The outfit is so big that there's all those corporate perks I'd been missing since my time at a big financial services company on Jefferson, with two offices in town to boot. We've got the shuttles, we've got the bus passes, and we've got the good vacation package. Hooray! Maybe one day I will get Bubba to Disney World!

Do I miss what I was doing? Sure. Slowing down into a new, different rhythm of life makes you look back at what happened before. I remember moving from a job where I had not one, but two phones on my desk and calls all day from all over the world. I left that for a job to sit in a really small office with a bunch of computer equipment and silence, because everyone sent e-mail. This was really hard to get used to at first. I missed my salesmen and customers calling me and everyone ordering stuff. I missed talking to folks all over the US and Canada.

Right now, what do I miss? People. My people. I always miss the people more than the lights, the sounds, the smells from my jobs. My patients, my coworkers from the floor, other people in the hospital who appeared on our unit--the consulting docs, the IV therapists, the respiratory therapists, the dieticians, and all the other assorted therapists. The right people appearing in your day will make any job tolerable.

Okay, I do miss certain smells, though. The smell of coffee wafting down the hall from Cairdeas coffee stand in the lobby and onto our unit woke me up many a day...and also sent me out for my very own cup o'Joe. I especially like Kaldi's Supersonica, which normally appears there on Thursdays.

There's no coffee shop here, but occasionally, I hear a hawk in the trees near the bluffs. In some buildings, I can look out and see the river meandering by, as muddy as ever. It's a panorama that reminds me of my childhood in the far reaches of St. Louis city, and being at high school, just down the road from here, where I could stand and look a certain way down river by one of the buildings at the north end of campus and see the Arch downtown.

The long, circuitous route has taken me places I'd never imagined being, and now, it just may have led me back home.