Xiaoniu 小妞

Some days you come to work and you wonder why you bother. Other days you come to work and things just seem to go so smoothly you wonder if you’re losing your mind. After working on my projects and getting stressed because of the amount of work required to them I’m finally getting to the point where the todo list is getting shorter instead of longer. The stress levels are receding. Today was one of the very good days.

One of our users, a Senior Investigator, wrote a very nice, formal letter to two of the Colonels expressing her commendations for our work on an application written for her and her team. One of the managers I regularly work with brought me and another guy into the IS Director’s office so that he could hand us a copy of the letter and to talk to us about it. He was very pleased with our work and that it was being recognized. The letter made it all the way up to two of the colonels, who are pretty much at the top of the food chain here. It was also given out to everybody at the IS manager’s meeting.

I worked with the guy that came to the meeting, who at the time was my direct supervisor, on a project to convert an existing Access database and application to a ColdFusion web application with an Oracle backend. He was able to fix all the data corruption and get the data into Oracle. I completely rewrote the application as a ColdFusion web application with many more features, including an ad-hoc search utility. According to her letter the ease of use and power of the application made it possible for her team to identify some offenders and make arrests. Pretty cool! It feels great to work on projects that do some good for people.

I’ve worked on a different project for a number of months now. It is a pet project initiated by one of the colonel’s and it has only recently been made available to users. That is the project I’m feverishly working on right now at work. Part of working on this project includes meeting with the colonel to show him my progress and give him a demonstration of its capabilities. Not long ago we had a meeting with all of the captains and many of the senior investigators to demo the app and give training. Before we started the colonel showed his praise for my work on that one. It was embarrassing with all those people, but pretty cool at the same time.

I try to be humble, but when you get praise from somebody important at work it feels good to tell others. I’m crossing my fingers since my annual review is coming up. I’m hoping that my supervisor has his eyes open. I wouldn’t mind a raise.