Well, it’s been approximately two years since my last HSE (Health, Safety and Environment) orientation for contract employees, so it was time to renew.
They’ve moved it even earlier, to 7:00am. And it is just as boring and unapplicable to my type of contracting as I remember it. But at least the guy giving it this time was a much more positive person.
I had to get up much earlier than usual, and get out of the house promptly without checking my morning email or anything. I had hoped that I’d be able to catch up with my Treo in the HSE training, but of course they hold it in a basement with no cell phone coverage.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that I had anxiety about getting up earlier than usual so I kept waking up in the middle of night to check the clock to make sure I hadn’t missed the alarm. I swear, I remember checking the clock about 3 times between 2:00am and 2:30am, and then again a couple of times between 5:00am and 5:30am. But of course when the alarm did go off at 6:00am I hit snooze, forgetting for the moment that I didn’t have enough buffer time in my schedule to allow for snoozing. Fortunately I remembered a minute or two later.
You know, I love this job. I bitch about my cow orkers and management every now and then, but that’s true of any job. But the work is challenging, it’s interesting, and it’s in a field I like (ok, it’s not GIS or aviation, but it’s close), on a language and OS I like developing on. And it pays more than my previous job, which means I don’t have to ask myself “can I afford to go flying this month” or ask my friends for money to help run the server that does our shared mailing lists, but most importantly it means we didn’t have to ask “how are we going to afford to have three kids in college at the same time?”. Being bored for 45 minutes at a god-awful hour of the morning once every two years is a small price to pay for that sort of freedom.