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too little, too late
May. 20th, 2008 10:09 pmI had vague hopes of using my income tax rebate to purchase airfare to either North Dakota to go dig for dinosaur bones in August, or to Florida to attend Convergence if the dino dig was full by the time I could register for it. Instead I got caught-up on my bills. While I'm honestly relieved to be out from under the financial tidal wave that was bearing down on me, I am disappointed that I'll likely not be vacationing too far out of state this year. For now, I can start to save money again.
I had my phone interview with the hiring manager at the hospital today. It was really just a chance for him to ensure I was clear about the expectations for the position, ask any lingering questions and for him to let me know that, again, it's down to me and one other guy. I'm very on-the-fence about this. I've little desire to learn VMS and am not thrilled about going to a job where they are doing very little with Linux. But there's a lot to be said for continuous employment, and I'd have that there. Of course, I had that opportunity at the last hospital job I had, and ultimately it didn't make a difference.
What may be a deal-breaker is that the hospital has a 60 day wait for health insurance. For a healthcare company, I personally think that a policy like that is damn near immoral. It's clearly a greed-driven policy strictly designed to cut costs; and for a non-profit with a stated mission of providing healthcare to the community, it's strikes me as being hypocritical. The deal-breaker part is that my kids have to be insured. When I was unemployed and then working part-time, they qualified for medicare. We didn't need to make use of it, but it was good that the coverage was there. Working a full-time job wouldn't allow for them to have that; unless the hospital was willing to pay for my COBRA costs (and I doubt that would be the case), I don't think I could accept the position if I wanted to. But, I've not gotten any offer yet, so this may never be a decision I have to make.
In the meantime, I was signed-up at work today to do my first weekend work. I'll get to work Saturday the 31st of this month doing software upgrades for the SAN on systems that can't be taken down during the week, and again on the 14th of next month--and maybe the 21st if anything goes awry on the 14th and the work doesn't get completed. My work on the 14th is first thing in the morning, and then I'll be a spectator for the rest of the day. One of my missions between now and then is to get the software engineers to declare both at what point in the work I can leave, and how badly things have to get before they will call off the effort on the 14th and reassemble for a second try on the 21st. Given that I cannot get a definitive list of the work to be done, let alone in any detail, I have little hope for any sort of agreement on limits before we start. But I should be able to get my manager to agree to the need, so when it doesn't happen, I won't have to lobby him on the stop about it.
I had my phone interview with the hiring manager at the hospital today. It was really just a chance for him to ensure I was clear about the expectations for the position, ask any lingering questions and for him to let me know that, again, it's down to me and one other guy. I'm very on-the-fence about this. I've little desire to learn VMS and am not thrilled about going to a job where they are doing very little with Linux. But there's a lot to be said for continuous employment, and I'd have that there. Of course, I had that opportunity at the last hospital job I had, and ultimately it didn't make a difference.
What may be a deal-breaker is that the hospital has a 60 day wait for health insurance. For a healthcare company, I personally think that a policy like that is damn near immoral. It's clearly a greed-driven policy strictly designed to cut costs; and for a non-profit with a stated mission of providing healthcare to the community, it's strikes me as being hypocritical. The deal-breaker part is that my kids have to be insured. When I was unemployed and then working part-time, they qualified for medicare. We didn't need to make use of it, but it was good that the coverage was there. Working a full-time job wouldn't allow for them to have that; unless the hospital was willing to pay for my COBRA costs (and I doubt that would be the case), I don't think I could accept the position if I wanted to. But, I've not gotten any offer yet, so this may never be a decision I have to make.
In the meantime, I was signed-up at work today to do my first weekend work. I'll get to work Saturday the 31st of this month doing software upgrades for the SAN on systems that can't be taken down during the week, and again on the 14th of next month--and maybe the 21st if anything goes awry on the 14th and the work doesn't get completed. My work on the 14th is first thing in the morning, and then I'll be a spectator for the rest of the day. One of my missions between now and then is to get the software engineers to declare both at what point in the work I can leave, and how badly things have to get before they will call off the effort on the 14th and reassemble for a second try on the 21st. Given that I cannot get a definitive list of the work to be done, let alone in any detail, I have little hope for any sort of agreement on limits before we start. But I should be able to get my manager to agree to the need, so when it doesn't happen, I won't have to lobby him on the stop about it.
