During my more than 20 years at my last job, one of my favorite coworkers was Rob, who started a year or two after I did and moved to another company after the first layoff. Rob was the rarest of coworkers, someone I regularly hung out with outside work, whether in a D&D campaign or at concerts (I hooked him on Josh Ritter, who we saw together at ( Read more... )

It's been 13 weeks since my first day of unemployment. This easily makes this my longest period of involuntary unemployment since I started working. My longest period of voluntary unemployment was my first semester of college, so in a another month or so we'll pass that ( Read more... )

When I started at my job back on May 20, 2002, I was employee number 150. On Monday, I was number 50 on the seniority list out of some 5200+. I will rise no higher, because on Monday they laid off more than 1000 people, and I was one of them. Yesterday was my last official day, ending my tenure at the only real post-college job I've ever had at 46 ( Read more... )

Last week, I shared the blog post I wrote at work for my 20th anniversary at my employer, which was on May 20. As promised, I have a few other thoughts about this anniversary to share ( Read more... )

This is the 14th and final post in my work blog series. I'm sure there will be more eventually, but for now I've ran through the backlog of posts that are generically relevant enough to consider posting here. Today's post went up on Thursday, May 19, 2022. Hey, that's today! With my 20th anniversary at work being tomorrow, I guess it's topical! I' ( Read more... )

My employer rolled out a program a few years ago called Mentoring Circles where they identified someone who was known to be good at a specific skill. This person would be the mentor for a circle of 5-8 people who applied to be in the program. For 2021, I was the mentor for "Ensures Accountability." I really enjoyed the process and actually am doing ( Read more... )

One downside to working from home is that when my company closed its offices in Cleveland on both Thursday and Friday due to snow, it didn't actually change my work plans. I got up to shovel the driveway both days just in case we had to go somewhere, but after that I still logged in to work as normal. Most of my colleagues did the same, except for ( Read more... )

At the end of my sophomore year, I was overwhelmed with stress and had lost my scholarship. A co-op seemed like a good idea to me. I procured a gig at Lexmark Printers in Lexington, Kentucky, through the power of nepotism - both my aunt and uncle worked there and hooked me up. Further, I was able to stay with my aunt and uncle in their house rent- ( Read more... )

My work from home odyssey that started at the beginning of the pandemic became slightly more official with my most recent paycheck.

I have been officially listed as a remote worker in our systems since I filled out a work survey earlier this month, but for tax purposes I was still listed as "Westlake, Ohio" because there has been an Ohio state of ( Read more... )

On July 14, 2017, I got my first cell phone for my Great California Road Trip.

I think that the very first person I remember meeting who had a cell phone was my long-time scoutmaster Dwight. In addition to being my scoutmaster and the father of my friend and classmate Joe, Dwight was an attorney, and I have possibly not accurate recollection of ( Read more... )