What I’ve Been Up To (Or Why the Hell is the Blog So Dead?)

So it’s been six months since I posted a real update huh? I didn’t mean for it to be that long, but I’ve been beyond busy as of late. However, much of that is by choice as I’ve been averaging twenty hours of overtime a week, which means a sixty hour work week total. Why? Well, I’ll have to be a bit brutally honest.

First off, I do like working at my current employer and the opinions in this post are entirely my own and not representative of the company, nor my fellow employees. For a little over a year now, I’ve been working for Kroger out of the Fred Meyer Main Office in Portland as a Support Center Analyst I. In other words, I do tech support over the phone for all 2,700+ stores Kroger has. Some days are pretty routine, other days are a nasty curveball. There’s not a whole lot of detail I can go in to, so I’ll just say when something goes down, it’s not a good day. I primarily support our e-commerce operations now – we call it ClickList – but I’m still backup support for our networking group. Put another way, it’s my job to make sure you can shop at Kroger, whether it’s online or in-store. If you can’t, it’s my problem.

Both teams are pretty much a 24-hour operation. ClickList at stores does close for the night, but you can order groceries 24/7. Both of the teams I’m on are a pretty good size, with additional members in Cincinnati, but both teams are also ones that are growing very fast, ClickList especially. That rapid growth means there is always a need for someone to keep an eye on them, which translates to overtime being available. Said overtime very much helps pay the bills, and I’m very grateful that it’s offered. It does, however, mean giving up nearly all of my free time.  I do have an extremely generous amount of vacation at Kroger that is paid, but to be honest, it’s vacation I can’t afford to make use of most of the time. I am putting some of it to use this weekend for Sakura-con before I loose my rollover vacation from last year, which is why I finally have the time to make an update (well, when I initially wrote this on a bus two weeks ago now anyway…)

So what does this mean for the blog? Unfortunately, it means for the time being, regular updates are going to stay on the rare side of things. I do hope to do better that semi-annual updates, but I can’t make any promises right now. I haven’t even fully unpacked my apartment from my move back in August still. Again, I am happy at Kroger, but it is keeping me very, very busy.