On The Rebound...

Well, I suppose it's appropriate.  Two weeks ago yesterday, 09/04/2022, I celebrated my fourth anniversary of my hire date with my current employer.  It also marked 29 days until my very last work day, per the agreement I was working under since 06/01/2022, which was when I was informed that, like most of my team, my job was being eliminated due to a restructuring, an elimination by my employer of a number of lines of work which I had supported, in multiple locations.  

How many?  I don't want to give you a specific number, but I will say that, regarding the division I worked for, I was tasked with specifically supporting a small number of locations, and we are eliminating services from over half of the locations - not just the ones I supported, but a number of others.  

So as you might imagine, there were a lot of people scrambling for the jobs that remained available. Given my very limited experience in the industry in which I am now working, I did some looking and decided perhaps my best options would lie elsewhere.  So I looked that direction.  

Then a number of my supervisors - that is, the new folks who are leading the team which I've been transferred to in order to assist in doing a job that didn't exist on May 31 of this year, but needed to be done because we have patients who need to continue services.  The decision to end some of our services doesn't mean those patients don't need them.  As a Boy Scout, a decent human being, and someone who simply gives a crap about other folks I've never met, I threw myself into the job.  Fortunately for me, my attitude was also aided and amplified by those who worked with me and led me.

So when my attention to detail, my specific training to document the events of the process so that someone else might be able to step right in where I had left off, and because my previous management beat into me the words "complete, concise, detailed, specific, and accurate" - and hey, let's remember that, coming out of an IT history where the misplacement of a comma, a colon, or a single character can completely and utterly destroy your expected outcome, well, hey, we were in my happy place.

So when I was recommended for a position very akin to the job I had been doing by my current supervisors, I was both elated and terrified.  Happy to think my hard work had been recognized as going above and beyond, which is the level which I hope to maintain all the time.  Yes, I know, there's a performance goal for every position, my goal has always been to look at the minimum performance level as the bare minimum.  I wish to exceed and do the best possible job I can within the various limits of time, information, energy, and everything else.  Terrified because I was worried I would be expected to step into a job which I don't know how to do and do it.  

So: The very best news is that I got the new job offer today, and that offer came with a raise, so my new conflicting problem is that, as of this week, I'm sitting on a balance of some 135 hours of earned vacation.  I earn about 3.25 hours a week, or about 6.5 hours a pay period.  So yes, you can see why I'd like to keep this job as I've been here four whole years, and I'm getting 3 weeks of vacation a year.  I can, thanks to the laws in the state of Minnesota, carry over 80 hours from year to year, so this will be most helpful next year when I have to take time off for my son's wedding.  The bad news is that I'm going to need to use up nearly two weeks before the end of the year or I'll lose it.

So you know what?  I will figure out a way to use up some of that vacation time.  I doubt I'll get to use it all, because, hey, all you folks who are about to head into the year-end benefits thing, well, you're my ... opportunity.  That is, my next job is to make sure that the services your doctor says you need will be covered by your insurance company for my employer.  The little tricks here are 1) Are we in network with your plan?  Sometimes we are, sometimes we aren't.  2) Does your plan cover the specific services, or exclude them?  Some do, some cover them under "major medical" which is a whole different network from standard coverage, and then 3) Are they willing to consider paying us for those services?  Whoops.  Not all of my job any longer.  Some insurers will automatically cover certain services, which means, in my little corner of the health care world, they will not require authorization for the specific medication and supplies.  That's what we call an "NAR" - No Authorization Required.  If they do, I find that out, document it, then send it to another queue to be handled by someone who is doing the job I used to do. 

So in other words, yeah, it's a promotion.  The bad news about it is that it's a shift in work week so I will now be working on Sundays, but I get ... yeah, that's right, Fridays off.  Whoo hoo.  And it's a shift in work hours.  I'll be starting an hour later, working an hour later.  So if you, like I, really like to see daylight, my opportunities to do so will be in the morning, not the evening, for the next few years.  

We'll see how that stays.  But I'm thrilled that I'm keeping my employer, keeping my seniority, and getting paid.  

So I am exceedingly thankful.  Yup, that's me - no bitching tonight, just tears of thanks.  And relief.