Quarter 3 Report Card

We're nine full months in to 2009, and its the first year in my 32 that I've tried to proactively think about what I want to spend the year doing. As I wrote about when this whole blog thing started out, New Year's resolutions never worked for me, and my "hypothesis" was that if I accomplished goals in the areas of life that matter to me I'd have 'peace of mind.' Call me crazy, OCD, whatever you prefer, but I have a long history of putting all of my 'happiness' eggs in one basket and this was a way for me to get a little more balanced.

The quick grades after nine months run down like this:
Career: C
Health: B+
Finances: B
Fun/Hobbies: A-
Social Life/Family: B

How I come up with these grades is more scientific/analytic than you probably care about, and the details would be repetitive from my last report card so I won't bore you the specifics in all of these areas. But one that's worth sharing something about is career-related 'things.' Those who know about my life (whether through the blog or elsewhere) are probably asking, "how can career things be a C? Didn't he have no job just a few short days ago?"

In response to your hypothetical questions, I am glad to be working. And its great to see that direct deposit hit the bank account every other week, to have an insurance card I'm not paying $700 a month for, and to no longer have the unemployment cloud following me around every corner.

But I'd be lying if I said I was blown away with my experience through the first five weeks. In case you're curious, I've been hired to help a large health system improve some of the core processes that patients experience at some point during their stay. On paper, it sounds ideal, especially considering my professional experience and long history as a patient living with a chronic illness in the chaotic mess of our health care system. Right now I'm in the midst of an orientation process, which culminates with being assigned to a hospital somewhere in the Chicago area.

I'm optimistic about a future with this organization, and I'm trying to steer clear of turning this in to a gripe fest, but the orientation process has been frustrating. In fact, calling it a process is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of a process, is that steps or activities are completed and it produces an outcome once the process is complete. I'm a believer that just about anything produced is created out of a process. But essentially, my orientation process has been to sit, occasionally observe a few coworkers doing their work, and then sit some more. So I'm not entirely clear what a fully orientated Delta Whiskey looks like at the end of this process.

I'm not sure if this would qualify as "ironic" but I work in a department that specializes in process improvement. So to have an orientation process as archaic as this strikes me as odd. And even odder (if that's a word) is that the coworkers I've spoken with have all described their orientation period in a similar way. Essentially lots of sitting around, waiting to be pulled on to do some work, but bored to tears during the first 30 - 90 days.

How all of this plays out remains to be seen, and I'll continue trying to find the silver lining, staying busy with whatever work heads in my direction, and maybe most importantly finding happiness with things outside of work....after all, the career is only one part of the bigger picture.