My new job

I can finally explain why the Umlaut has mostly gone quiet over the last few months. The job I took procuring robots for Germany's finest automation boutiques was an awful fit for me. I was coming home every night with a horrible numbness behind my eyes, and my creative urge was simply gone. My talents at wordsmithery are amateurish in the best of times, and the forlorn scraps of bloggery I generated during that time are really best left unpublished.

Fortunately, that's all behind me now. Over the last two weeks, I was invited twice to interview for a position as a programmer at a small software development firm. The first interview was with the company's owner and seemed mostly to make sure that I would get along with the team. We talked about my goals and how I like to work, but also about my hobbies and his jazz band. We joked around an awful lot for a job interview, which made me nervous, but if he seemed displeased I was prepared at any moment to point at him and whine "but you started it!" Unfortunately, I never had the chance to employ this social masterstroke, because before I knew it the interview was over, I'd been invited back for a more technical conversation, and the whole company had taken up top-hats and canes to accompany me to the front door with a rousing, up-tempo rendition of "Getting to Know You."

I felt right at home.

When I came to the second interview, I greeted my interviewers (the owner again, and his more technically inclined partner) cheerfully, to which they responded by nodding and "mmmhmmm"-ing, while making marks on their notepads. This time, I could see, shit was real. I spent an hour or two answering questions about database structures, my experience simulating object-oriented behavior in an imperative language*, and the relative merits of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Evidently my technical knowledge, and willingness to grudgingly admit that Adama had to deal with a harder situation than Reynolds was ever put in, made a good impression. The next day, I got a phone call offering me the position.

The experience of resigning felt really anticlimactic. I'm not angry at anyone at my sales job, so I didn't have any reason to jump up on my desk or throw my chair or anything fun like that. I just wrote up a short letter, printed and signed it, and handed it to my boss. Well, first I had to look up the Japanese word for "letter of resignation"(辞表-jihyou) so that I could say "excuse me, sir, this is my letter of resignation." He looked a bit surprised, but was very friendly and businesslike in planning my exit with me. I'll be working until next Thursday, then taking my six days of remaining vacation. Starting on the 20th, I'll be a programmer again!


* Geeky footnote: I once had to refactor a C++ program I had written into C for my class in parallel computing, because the school's only parallel compiler was for C. That was the first time I understood just how awesome object oriented programming is.