Where I’ve been lately

It feels like it’s been forever since I posted anything here; in reality it’s only been a week. But what a wild and crazy week it was!

On Tuesday morning, October 7, my boss through the company I work for (as in, not my Ford boss, my ‘real’ boss), came to my desk around 6:00 am.  He never comes to my desk, so I knew something was up. He says ‘I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?’ Wanting to end on a good note, I picked the bad news first. The bad news was that I was no longer working at that location. The good news was that I had a new position at another facility about 5 miles down the road. He was nice enough to ‘give me the day off’ on Tuesday, even though I had already worked my Tuesday shift, and I was to report at 7am Wednesday.

Apparently the story I got was that my company management received a call from Ford on Monday afternoon saying that they could no longer use my services. I don’t know if it was a matter of me personally, or the fact that they don’t need an engineer on the midnight shift in that lab. Either way, I don’t really care. My company was gracious enough to create a position for me at the other local lab, which is a facility operated and managed by my company, not Ford.

I spent the rest of the week (Wednesday – Friday) on day shift, working 7am – 3:30pm. The first two full days I spent in front of a computer screen doing online training modules and getting the appropriate security clearance. Friday was my first opportunity to get to see the lab facility itself. The facility is a full vehicle test facility. Prototype vehicles are subjected to wind tunnel and/or chassis dynamometer testing. Since my company operates and manages the facility, Ford allows us to sell our excess capacity to other clients (hence the security training). We get to keep our test cells utilized more often, and Ford gets a cut of everything we sell off, so it works out well for everybody.

Since the news of my departure from the engine dynamometer lab was a surprise to everyone, my role in the new facility is yet to be defined. It looks as though I’ll be doing facility related projects to begin with, rather than working on test programs. I guess everybody will get a clearer picture over the next few days.

So that’s the good news. The ‘bad’ news is that with a ‘real job’ now, I have to make room for things I used to do while I worked (ie studying, blogging, RWOL) outside of work hours. I’ve started to realize how much time those things really do take up, which is part of the reason I’ve been absent of late. Also unfortunately, the counseling process that I’ve written of previously has been put on temporary hold for at least another week.

As race day approaches, I have kept up on my workouts for the most part. I’ll update everybody on those in my next post… stay tuned!

~ by fatboyrunning on October 13, 2008.