Well, started the job, obviously. It's weird. I was basically a god at my last employer. I was essentially "the guy" and did everything. I was completely overworked and burnt out, but I was a lot better than previous admins they had.
It's a different story at my current employer. The employer I work for now is rolling in so much cash they don't know what to do with it. Our IT department is huge for the number of users. At my last company before outsourcing we were 13 people to a range of 800 - 1200 employees. Now I'm a team of something like 40 people to 2000. There is so much money invested in IT that if something breaks it's not really that big a deal because there is so much redundancy and when something isn't redundant it's a virtual machine that can be restored in about an hour with very little stress. It's not even just that, it's the culture. People are more patient. At my last job if someone called about something we worked on it until resolution almost immediately and if we didn't there was hell to pay because we had less than zero support from upper management. Here people will call and there isn't really that sense of urgency and people are very understanding. It's nice, but can be kind of boring. It's also overwhelming because there are so many servers and so much more true enterprise technology that I feel like a complete rookie. I was a god, but now I feel like an idiot in comparison to my coworkers. Some of the guys are just brilliant at IT like I've never seen. Hell we have some CCIE (high level Cisco certification) that was hired from Colorado that didn't start for more than three months after he was hired. Honestly I can't believe I got the job. I just hope I can ramp up quickly enough that I can add value.
I'm hoping I'm just underselling myself, as my wife and mother-in-law say I always do. And to be fair, when I got my job before last I had never even worked with Windows Server outside of a classroom and at my last job I was building out VMware vSphere clusters tied to SANs. So I guess I can learn it with time. It's just that before I was so much better than everyone else and here I'm not.
One thing about South Florida that I didn't realize is that no one is from here. It seems rare to run into a native Floridian, much less a native South Floridian. It's like everyone from the Northeast moves down here and I guess people from here move up to the Northeast. One guy I work with is a native South Floridian but he always talks about how much he hates it. I just tell him: "the grass isn't always greener, there is no perfect place". A consequence of all this is that there is no sense of hometown pride amongst anyone. No one cares about the Dolphins or Marlins or the big college teams like the Hurricanes, Gators, or Seminoles. Giants, Jets, Patriots, Eagles, Bills, and Steelers fans probably outnumber Dolphins fans 5-1. It's even worse if you look at baseball.
I'm starting to miss Cincy pretty bad. It's the little things. I'll see stuff on Facebook I missed, or just think about how I used to hang out with some friends on Saturday or go out to the bar with some awesome co-workers on Fridays. Miss seeing basically every Reds game on TV or at least hearing them on the radio, or being able to go down to a game on a whim. Miss hanging out with my brothers and reminiscing about growing up. Miss UDF ice cream, goetta, every kind of sausage you an imagine (especially Queen City sausage), Busken cookies, LaRosa's pizza, and having tons of restaurants less than five minutes from my house.
Miss having my own house a lot. My house still hasn't sold and we are still living with my sister-in-law. It's scary, actually. We've lowered the price down to what we bought it for and if it sold now we'd probably owe a few thousand due to realtor commission. But there has been very little interest in our home at that price. Our realtor said that their company has had a good level of interest in some other properties in the area, but they are priced $15-20 thousand less than ours (though ours has more bedrooms and is nicer). But we are just not getting any hits. We've had one showing since the house has been on the market. One. One piece of encouragement is that it was at the original high price when that happened and they liked the house, just thought the bedrooms were too small. I now wish I did stay in Cincy to sell the house because the bedrooms do look tiny with no furniture but they actually have plenty of room and look bigger with furniture in there.
At this point I don't expect the house to sell until spring, and even then I'm not sure. The economy seems to have a dimmer outlook every day. I just don't know how we can lower the price. If we do and it sold, we would owe tens of thousands of dollars at closing, and we just don't have that. It simply can't be done. We've considered trying a short sale or even walking away, but it would hurt our credit and we are planning to buy down here and it wouldn't happen if we did that. Besides, many people walking away are people that owe $100 thousand plus more than their house is worth and we're not in that situation. We're just missing by a few thousand to ten or twenty thousand. We've considered renting, but you can't sell out from under a renter and I'd be worried about maintenance, especially with the distance. We could hire a company but in the end I don't think it would really be worth it. Besides, renting would devalue the neighborhood, further hurting the value of our house.
There is some good stuff though. The weather here is still really humid, but I have to say that when I see that our low is 81 and Cincy's high is 62, I don't feel too bad. The sunrises and sunsets here are amazing. I can go swimming every day if I want. I work for a great organization and make a lot of money. There is a lot to do here. The beach is less than 30 minutes away. I can get one of my favorite beers (Presidente) whenever I want. The area we are living in is really nice. People here are nicer than expected.
Just wanted to share an update with you guys.
