Full Metal Lunchbox

I just woke up from about an hour and a half of sleep and will soon be rushing out the door to make the 11:18PM train downtown.

I have never felt this sleepy before in my entire life, and am writing this post to capture the moment.

For a moment just now I felt myself falling asleep while STANDING UP in the kitchen. The pull to crawl back into bed, or even just snooze here in my chair feels like I'm an addict being drawn to smoke crack.

This working all night business is going to take some getting used to.

I'd better go and catch my train now..

At 1:00AM this morning I left to work third shift for the first time. I wont be working third shift permanently for a few more days, and normally the third shift starts at midnight. But I had to come in tonight at this strange hour to help cover for regular third shift person who called in sick.

Making tonight even more of a challenge is the fact that I've already worked a day shift today, so I didn't have much time to snooze before going in to work.

Here's a picture of the #79 CTA bus at a little after 1:00AM. I had the entire bus to myself.


Riding the Red Line train in the middle of the night is an experience I haven't had much of since I was much younger and used to go out more. Waiting in the cold on the platform surrounded by all manner of people smoking, pissing, and spitting is an experience that one just can't get in your smaller cities.



The streets outside 427 South LaSalle are dark and quiet at 2:00AM, but the production floor is humming with activity. My boss is here with me tonight, and he is answering all the questions I have and filling in all the gaps of information in the training I've received these past couple of weeks. Which is a shame, really, because I'm too sleepy to absorb much of what he's telling me. Seems to make sense, though. Something about DIP files... zzzzzz.....

No (yawn) I wasn't sleeping! Honest!

Streaming music makes the workday (or evening or night, depending) go faster. Getting streaming radio service on the Internet is tough if you work for a large company that tightly controls its IP activity. Fortunately, I have access to a legacy proxy server that makes it possible, for now, to jam out at my desk. But I'm preparing for the worst and downloading as much music as I can now in anticipation of eventually getting cut off.

Just completed the first week at my new job. I'm a Production Flow Analyst for a little known part of the IT group of the Remittance & Image Processing unit at JP Morgan Chase. I provide techincal support to a group that performs paperwork processing and provides lockbox services to the Department of Homeland Security.

It's nice having a new job, but my hours this week (noon to 8:00PM) have been a bit of an adjustment, because my daily eight hours this week covered the busiest times of both the first and second shift. I had to work these weird hours in order to get trained. Next week will be easier, but soon after that I'll be transitioning to my permanent shift of midnight to 8:00AM, which will certainly be a bigger adjustment.

Today is my last day as a Tek Systems contractor.

It's been a long year contracting at Bank One. I've worked with some terrific people, and also a few others. Always by the hour.

It was as much a surprise to me as anyone else that I was invited back to the same project I was supposedly kicked off from a couple of days previously.

So this is how I'm ending nearly a year of on-and-off contracting for Bank One: out in Elgin.

By the way, to those of you who think I'm exaggerating, here is photographic proof that rural America begins just beyond the Bank One parking lot:

Here's a picture of me and Reggie eating breakfast in the cafeteria, as taken through the reflection of the skylight. That's me center-right.

I was out there yesterday and today, and will finish my Tek Systems carear (for now) in Elgin tomorrow. There will be no ceremony as I turn my laptop in to some technician I don't know. On Monday I begin my new, permanent job with the bank, and with it a whole new adventure.

By the way, anyone reading this blog who worked on the Switch Project will be amused to know that I'm spending my last day as a contractor conducting Client Interviews. It never ends.

Today I worked for a day at 8430 W. Bryn Mawr, conveniently just across the road from Justyna's job at Cingular.

This assignment for JP Morgan actually involved some time inside a Citibank office. Weird, huh? It's like traveling to Leningrad for an American Studies course.

Most of my day was spent dragging and dropping. Here's an exciting photo.

But the real excitement happens tomorrow when I return to Elgin and work once more on the very project I was kicked off of!