My grandparents and my pretty grand job.
My job was giving me minor panic attacks today.
Earlier, I was beginning to think that my work at Ford hadn't prepared me for a "real" helpdesk. Then I realized that it's just a different help desk. There's a great deal more to deal with. I kept watching open incidents pile up in my queue and not knowing what to do with them: how do I process these new hire accounts? What's the procedure for dealing with a remote user's hardware problems? How much should I try to talk people through and when should I take over their machine with VnC? How do I update VPN accounts on the Nortel box? etc...
My manager is as busy as I am and I find it tough to find times to interrupt what he's doing to ask him to help me with what I'm doing. I had some moments of real panic today and I worried that I wouldn't be up to dealing with all the stuff this job requires of me. I managed to fight down the fight/flight response and keep working, and I managed to at least get most of my incidents into, if not closed, then at least 'waiting for response from client' status, and I was feeling better at the end of the day. Having worked through lunch 'cause I felt behind probably didn't help. I have to get through this beginning because it's only going to get easier from here. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. I hope I'm right.
I got my first paycheck today even though I can't cash it until tomorrow. It's amazing how much additional motivation a nice paycheck is. A few more months of this and Andrea and I won't have to worry about money anymore...
So about, my trip out to my grandparents' house.
I went straight there after work on Tuesday, meeting Andrea, who drove from the house, once I got there. We had dinner (grandma cooked up some wonderful frozen pizza *grins*) and the four of us sat and talked for a while. I haven't spent nearly as much time with them as I really ought to have and I plan to see them and my other family in Illinois much more frequently. I was always too shy to try to get know my grandparents very well and I really regret that now.
They are fascinating people. My grandmother rode a horse to school as a little girl. My grandfather shoed them. They've had long and interesting lives that I need to get up the courage to find out more about.
They've both decided that the house they live in is too much for them to maintain and they're moving into an addition on the house that one of their daughters and her husband own. They're taking a bunch of their stuff that won't fit in their smaller quarters to sell at a city-wide garage sale this weekend and they were having family over to have first chance at things that they were interested in. They gave us a few really neat things like the croquet set that I was fascinated with as a child (no one else wanted it; a shame. It feels like such a beautifully antiquated and Victorian game to me, like something Ozy's dad would play in the front lawn). He's also going to give me about 15 feet of shelf space worth of records, the vast majority of them old 78s. I will definitely write more about those after we pick them up. Plus I have a great little 8 track player which is another thing I've wanted for a while.
Most important to me though is all of the metalworking equipment he gave to me.
As I said, my grandfather shoed horses. For more years than I've been alive he was a professional farrier. I grew up knowing this and thought it was really neat, but never really asked him much about it. As I got older and my interests developed in the way they did (Gamer? interested in blacksmithing? Who'd have thought!), I got more and more interested in learning more about it. So I asked him to teach me. A few years ago, a year or two before I met Andrea I think, He began to.
I distinctly remember the first time I watched him fire up his forge. The swirling whirlpool of coal smoke that rushed about the inside of his forge and poured out of the chimney is indelibly etched in my mind. He talked about the right way to bank up the fire and when to take the clinkers out of it and when to feed more coal to it. We only used the coal forge on two occasions before he started using his propane one with me, so I didn't learn the care and feeding of a coal fire nearly as well as I wished. The coal forge was old and the sheet metal in the hood was eaten away and the propane one was easier to set up and use, so we spent a while on that instead, even though we both thought, without ever quite communicating it to each other, that the propane forge was just somehow not as friendly.
The first thing I ever made was a curved, smushed, and otherwise deformed, piece of metal rod. Just to learn how metal reacts to being heated to several hundred degrees and smacked around. After that though, we began to make gatehooks, plant hangers, simple things, but useful things. It felt so good to look at a pretty little wrought-iron plant hanger and think 'I made that'. And all the while we worked together he talked to me about technique (never let the metal get cold. Know what you're going to do with the piece before you take it out of the forge) and told me stories.
I only worked with him four or five times before moving out to Michigan. I'm unhappy with myself for not having going out there more, or begun sooner, but things are as they are. The last thing I made with him is a pentacle, about a food and a half in diameter, that he helped me with as a present for my wife. We went out together to a hardware store and bought the metal stock as he told me about how, if we had more time, we would look through a junkyard for the right kind of steel and about how to pick that steel out. I shaped the metal into a circle and five lines, and he welded them all together. I think I treasure it as much as Andrea does, if perhaps for somewhat different reasons.
The day I left for Michigan, he gave me a hammer that he made himself. It has a worn wooden handle, smooth from long use, and a compact, steel gray head, dusted with rust, with his initials stamped into the side. Though I don't think he knows how much it means to me, it's one of my most treasured possesions.
Tuesday night, he and I packed many of his tools into my truck. He isn't going to use them anymore and soon won't have space for them. He said he wanted them to go to someone who's going to use them. He entrusted me with his forges, his anvil, and a bucket-full of hammers and tongs. Not everything I might need, he told me, but enough for me to make anything I might need. I have rarely felt so honored, so special. In return, he just asked me to think of him when I use them. How could I not? Every time I look at the hammer he gave me two years ago I think of him. It has his energy in it, his spirit. The same is true for his other tools. To me, he is an indelible part of them. I'm not going to just let them sit in the garage. I'm not going to keep saying to myself that I'll do something with them when I have more time. I won't let him and myself down that way.
Now that I'm back in Wisconsin, I have a good while ahead of me to get to know my grandparents better than I have. To know them as well as I should. When I was in Michigan, time kept slipping away from me. I won't let that happen here. There a lot of things that are important to me that I want to do; that I need to do. Spending more time with my grandparents is one of them. I've never been good at getting to know people, but I'm a lot better than I used to be. I asked my grandfather about a set of really nice speakers that he was going to take to the rummage sale. How much did he want for them? "Two dollars." He told me. Two dollars, and for Andrea and I to take he and grandma out for pizza sometime. On that deferred compensation, I'm going to make sure they collect in spades. I truly want to see a lot more of them, and I think Andrea does too.
I know you don't read this, but I love you grandma and grandpa.
Earlier, I was beginning to think that my work at Ford hadn't prepared me for a "real" helpdesk. Then I realized that it's just a different help desk. There's a great deal more to deal with. I kept watching open incidents pile up in my queue and not knowing what to do with them: how do I process these new hire accounts? What's the procedure for dealing with a remote user's hardware problems? How much should I try to talk people through and when should I take over their machine with VnC? How do I update VPN accounts on the Nortel box? etc...
My manager is as busy as I am and I find it tough to find times to interrupt what he's doing to ask him to help me with what I'm doing. I had some moments of real panic today and I worried that I wouldn't be up to dealing with all the stuff this job requires of me. I managed to fight down the fight/flight response and keep working, and I managed to at least get most of my incidents into, if not closed, then at least 'waiting for response from client' status, and I was feeling better at the end of the day. Having worked through lunch 'cause I felt behind probably didn't help. I have to get through this beginning because it's only going to get easier from here. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. I hope I'm right.
I got my first paycheck today even though I can't cash it until tomorrow. It's amazing how much additional motivation a nice paycheck is. A few more months of this and Andrea and I won't have to worry about money anymore...
So about, my trip out to my grandparents' house.
I went straight there after work on Tuesday, meeting Andrea, who drove from the house, once I got there. We had dinner (grandma cooked up some wonderful frozen pizza *grins*) and the four of us sat and talked for a while. I haven't spent nearly as much time with them as I really ought to have and I plan to see them and my other family in Illinois much more frequently. I was always too shy to try to get know my grandparents very well and I really regret that now.
They are fascinating people. My grandmother rode a horse to school as a little girl. My grandfather shoed them. They've had long and interesting lives that I need to get up the courage to find out more about.
They've both decided that the house they live in is too much for them to maintain and they're moving into an addition on the house that one of their daughters and her husband own. They're taking a bunch of their stuff that won't fit in their smaller quarters to sell at a city-wide garage sale this weekend and they were having family over to have first chance at things that they were interested in. They gave us a few really neat things like the croquet set that I was fascinated with as a child (no one else wanted it; a shame. It feels like such a beautifully antiquated and Victorian game to me, like something Ozy's dad would play in the front lawn). He's also going to give me about 15 feet of shelf space worth of records, the vast majority of them old 78s. I will definitely write more about those after we pick them up. Plus I have a great little 8 track player which is another thing I've wanted for a while.
Most important to me though is all of the metalworking equipment he gave to me.
As I said, my grandfather shoed horses. For more years than I've been alive he was a professional farrier. I grew up knowing this and thought it was really neat, but never really asked him much about it. As I got older and my interests developed in the way they did (Gamer? interested in blacksmithing? Who'd have thought!), I got more and more interested in learning more about it. So I asked him to teach me. A few years ago, a year or two before I met Andrea I think, He began to.
I distinctly remember the first time I watched him fire up his forge. The swirling whirlpool of coal smoke that rushed about the inside of his forge and poured out of the chimney is indelibly etched in my mind. He talked about the right way to bank up the fire and when to take the clinkers out of it and when to feed more coal to it. We only used the coal forge on two occasions before he started using his propane one with me, so I didn't learn the care and feeding of a coal fire nearly as well as I wished. The coal forge was old and the sheet metal in the hood was eaten away and the propane one was easier to set up and use, so we spent a while on that instead, even though we both thought, without ever quite communicating it to each other, that the propane forge was just somehow not as friendly.
The first thing I ever made was a curved, smushed, and otherwise deformed, piece of metal rod. Just to learn how metal reacts to being heated to several hundred degrees and smacked around. After that though, we began to make gatehooks, plant hangers, simple things, but useful things. It felt so good to look at a pretty little wrought-iron plant hanger and think 'I made that'. And all the while we worked together he talked to me about technique (never let the metal get cold. Know what you're going to do with the piece before you take it out of the forge) and told me stories.
I only worked with him four or five times before moving out to Michigan. I'm unhappy with myself for not having going out there more, or begun sooner, but things are as they are. The last thing I made with him is a pentacle, about a food and a half in diameter, that he helped me with as a present for my wife. We went out together to a hardware store and bought the metal stock as he told me about how, if we had more time, we would look through a junkyard for the right kind of steel and about how to pick that steel out. I shaped the metal into a circle and five lines, and he welded them all together. I think I treasure it as much as Andrea does, if perhaps for somewhat different reasons.
The day I left for Michigan, he gave me a hammer that he made himself. It has a worn wooden handle, smooth from long use, and a compact, steel gray head, dusted with rust, with his initials stamped into the side. Though I don't think he knows how much it means to me, it's one of my most treasured possesions.
Tuesday night, he and I packed many of his tools into my truck. He isn't going to use them anymore and soon won't have space for them. He said he wanted them to go to someone who's going to use them. He entrusted me with his forges, his anvil, and a bucket-full of hammers and tongs. Not everything I might need, he told me, but enough for me to make anything I might need. I have rarely felt so honored, so special. In return, he just asked me to think of him when I use them. How could I not? Every time I look at the hammer he gave me two years ago I think of him. It has his energy in it, his spirit. The same is true for his other tools. To me, he is an indelible part of them. I'm not going to just let them sit in the garage. I'm not going to keep saying to myself that I'll do something with them when I have more time. I won't let him and myself down that way.
Now that I'm back in Wisconsin, I have a good while ahead of me to get to know my grandparents better than I have. To know them as well as I should. When I was in Michigan, time kept slipping away from me. I won't let that happen here. There a lot of things that are important to me that I want to do; that I need to do. Spending more time with my grandparents is one of them. I've never been good at getting to know people, but I'm a lot better than I used to be. I asked my grandfather about a set of really nice speakers that he was going to take to the rummage sale. How much did he want for them? "Two dollars." He told me. Two dollars, and for Andrea and I to take he and grandma out for pizza sometime. On that deferred compensation, I'm going to make sure they collect in spades. I truly want to see a lot more of them, and I think Andrea does too.
I know you don't read this, but I love you grandma and grandpa.