Both Sides Now...

It sure seems a very long time ago, but in the grander scale of time, not so long.  Longer than some lifetimes, shorter than others.  

But back in the 1970s, my folk had a piano teacher come in for all of us to take lessons.  I think we each got maybe 15 minutes with her, and somehow we were all expected to practice our lessons during the rest of the week.  Mind you, I didn't know many other families with a baby grand piano.  In fact, we were the only one I knew of.  We had an upright piano we'd gotten before we moved into the house on the river, but the second summer I'd gone to summer camp, probably 1976, late July, my folks made a deal.  I came home from camp and the upright piano was out of the corner of the living room, replaced with this monster baby grand.  

It played well enough, for all I knew.  I started out with a lot of finger exercises and scales, and then the dime dropped.  I figured out how to connect my piano lessons and what I learned from them to my more-favorite band experience.  But the real big deal was the math.  It just made sense.  It was an almost immediate connection between scales and the different notes.  

Things got easier then.  I do suppose it helped that Mrs. Robinette was surprised by the fact that at the age of 13 I was able to span an octave and two notes on the piano.  It was a stretch, but it wasn't ten key with a few extras.  Then I started expanding.  At some point in the 1970s, the rather old ragtime tune "The Entertainer" became quite popular on the radio, and I learned how to play it from sheet music we already had.  Down I went.  More sheet music, more songs, then I learned the theme song to the TV show Hill Street Blues.  And for a while, until I got too busy, I was working to learn Hey Jude, and Linus and Lucy, the song most folks know as the Charlie Brown Theme. 

But before all of those songs Mrs. Robinette decided we needed a recital.  She had arranged for a classroom at the local public grade school and two other families, but with five kids, we outnumbered them by 1, so they had to listen to us.  I remember going fairly early on, and playing Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell.  

Today I got a little bit of that in so many ways.  My supervisor, who has been somewhere in the leadership above me for the past nearly 6 years, had her last day.  Her last day after nearly 19 years at our company, and according to her announcement on this past Wednesday, retirement start on next Monday.  On one hand, it was wholly unexpected.  It wasn't even hinted at that she might be leaving.  On the other hand, it's a reminder of what happened to her supervisor, who wasn't looking to leave, but I expect she was asked to do it.  I do recall being escorted out o fthe office on a rather unexpected last day in part because I'd been insufficiently persuasive in promoting our rather desperate need for a better backup system.  I got it, I mean, when data gets lost, the IT manager is obviously at fault if there's no one else responsible for backups.  And I have been on the other side of the desk, explaining that the bottom line is that the individual wasn't doing the job we needed done. 

The bigger challenge is we're seeing the near-end-game results from major upgrades to core systems.  We appear to be overstaffed by quite a few people.  I am not going to wait around for the phone call.  I'm looking internally, because I've finally earned a third week of vacation, but I'm also looking outside.  Not for tech jobs - I've been out of day-to-day tech for over a decade, I miss some of it, but I'm not likely to be of interest to many employers in that field.  Best to focus on my new strengths - detailed orientation from the IT field, experience in healthcare from the current job.  Should be something out there for me.  Plenty of jobs on job boards...  Now to apply.