my soft spot

just a mom who plays hockey and knits

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Turning it around

At G's special camp this summer, they had lots of catch phrases, including "Turn it around." This meant taking a negative attitude and turning it positive--if you're annoyed or crabby, finding a cheerful, optimistic attitude and putting it on. It really seemed to work for these kids, including G.

This morning, I was given a program written by the big boss. The program had a problem: it was crashing on Windows but not on Linux. The error message was really unusual ("stack overflow" on entering a function, for you programming types). I tried a bunch of things, feeling more and more desperate and random, and my thoughts turned to my latest friend who was laid off recently. Her family is very concerned and it was quite a shock to hear that she was laid off. She seemed like such a capable, powerful, and important part of that company. They offered to transfer her across the nation, and when she turned it down, it was buh-bye. Ugh. Awful.

So as I'm working on my problem, I started thinking that maybe it was a test. Maybe we were looking at downsizing (for the second time in the company's 32-year history) and this was a little "Let's see if she knows her stuff" kind of test. The bug was a nasty one, crashing our memory profiling program. I finally made some overall changes and it works, and my boss approved that (phew).

Then, this afternoon, he shouldered me with a new set of responsibilities (read: problems) and started off with, "Because you're good at this..." which usually means, Look out!, but this time, I really needed to hear this. And no pink slips at this point. Oy.

Well, being good at 'this' is always good to hear. I'm keeping my looking-for-work friends in my thoughts, too. Best of luck, friends.

1 Comments:

At 3:46 PM, November 02, 2008, Blogger Dharma said...

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