Nearly two months in my new job, and one month in my new house. Things are beginning to look kind of civilized now. We bought a 32-inch TV set last night. Yson and Eson were so excited--we got a good price because the cardboard box had been torn open. They pasted the box together, and we bought it. The box was too big to go through the outside door, but luckily it fit when we took it out of the box.
We celebrated our having saved all that money by taking the kids to their first Indian meal. I was really missing Indian food from--hadn't had any since CA. We lucked out and stuffed ourselves--it was almost us that couldn't fit through the door. At 8:30, Diana and I were inert on the bed, while faint whispers of 32-inch sound filtered up from the basement. At 11:15, we woke up enough to get under the covers. At 1:30, I woke up, thirsty as all get out, and here it is 4AM and I'm still awake.
Tomorrow (or, rather, today) I need to make the fateful decision on which the entertainment of our household will depend--cable or dish? One the one hand, our house is surrounded by trees, so the dish is going to be a dicey situation. On the other hand, since I had dish in my old house, they have a deal where they will come out and install new hardware for free. This sounds like a pretty good deal--if they can't get it to work from here, we'll go with cable. This is all bound up with Internet access in a confusing way as well.
The phones are more expensive out here than in CA. Funny how that didn't seem like any kind of a consideration, but suddenly we are paying $120 a month for basic phone service, not counting long distance, and that doesn't even account for Internet access. We need to get our information fix. I've never been passionately dismissive of voice-grade service, like so many of my friends, but I don't really have any high bandwidth habits either. As an intellectual property creator myself, I haven't chosen to use Napster-like services, and since I don't watch much TV or videos or movies, streaming video isn't much of a draw either. Some of the radio stations are neat, but since my tastes run to classical music that doesn't play well out of three-inch speakers, I don't do that much either. I guess I'm showing my age...
As I look back on my second month of my job, I'm pretty pleased with how things have worked out. I'm intellectually stimulated by the problems that confront me at work, respect and like my co-workers, am delighted by the company culture and values, and they pay good. I keep waiting to wake up from my dream...
Actually, it's more like a honeymoon, I suppose. But still. A year or so ago, Sam and I did some NLP values work on my career values. This is a wonderful technique where you start asking innocent-sounding questions, and go deeper and deeper as you identify values (things important to you) that might appear to conflict (like a desire for independence and a desire to get paid well). You work out the conflicts, and come up with a set of values that are typically small in number and very congruent.
So we did it, and my top career values were:
So I join my company, and notice their values printed in the handbook they distribute to employees:
These are pretty amazing aligned, no? And the best part is, the company is living their values.
And I am too.
Thank you for reading.
Copyright © 2002 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.
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