Good News/Bad News

Good news first: "my" former driver has been given the raise he deserved _long_ ago.

Bad news next: the added responsibility given him in order to have a reason to give him a raise was my job of "network administrator."

Why is this bad news, you who have heard me complain about that job may ask? Well the answer is this. When asked what I do here, my only valid response now is, "nothing." Others in my position with this company are in places as language students, so it makes sense for them to sit in a village a talk to people. Me who is here with a humanitarian organization...not so much. With the SysAdmin job, I could at least tell people that I kept the computers running in our office. Now I have nothing.

As a friend put it, I'm now unemployed without having to worry about the money.

Have you ever spent approximately 8-9 months doing virtually nothing but wait for transportation, etc. to where you're supposed to be working...only then to be told that not only should you continue waiting, now we're going to take away the only responsibility you had which semi-legitimized your stay here?

On the plus side, this is very good for my reading life, and has proved useful for piano practice. If I keep going like I've been going, I'll actually have in my long-term memory all those songs I played for recitals back in the day.

Please keep me in your thoughts over the next few days as I do the odious task of preparing all of the computers for the hand off (this includes at least three installations of SP2), then transition into the far more odious task of finding _more_ things with which to fill my repeating Groundhog Day. Hope with me and Bill Murray that I can find useful and edifying uses for my remaining time and that I can convince the powers that be to actually follow through on all they've been telling me for the past several months.

Of course, the next question is: "Why stay?" And the answer is: "1) Because this is where I'm supposed to be right now, 2) because I made a committment which I will continue to uphold to the best of my ability, and 3) because I love it here and it's gonna be hard enough to leave in 6 months - I don't even want to think about leaving early and 'in disgrace.'"