An Auspicious Week.

My first week as an employee of MECMC has just about come to an end. This is an incredible and incredibly large organization. I’m utterly lost. There have been a couple of minor disappointments, like the fact that I’m working from a cubicle with no door, but overall, I am happy and confident that I will be able to work effectively here. It’s really setting into perspective the place that I came from. The phrase that keeps rattling around in my head, over and over again, is: everyone here knows how to do their job. That was simply not true where I came from. Many people didn’t even really know what their job was.

I am feeling very overwhelmed. They put a huge simulation model on my desk, and I’m expected to either learn it or replace it. Which is fine, of course, that’s what I do. And I think I’m going to replace it. Frankly, some of the things they did in the first place were bafflingly absurd, mixing real-world and simulated processes to try to mimic a real world output trajectory. That’s not going to work in the best case. And this wasn’t the best case. This was in part because their model was developed by outside consultants trying to use a cookie cutter approach. So I think I’m just going to tear it down to the studs and re-do it the way I think it should have been done in the first place. And I cleared with them that that’s an acceptable practice. They told me they have no emotional attachment to it. Let ‘er burn.

What I need to remember is what I’ve been doing all along. I wrote here a few months ago that I needed to apply my AA program to my move: do today what I can do today. Every day do something. And take it one day at a time. I don’t have the software I need on my work computer to get to work yet. So instead I will simply dig in to other things. I am still meeting a whole group of stakeholders. And soon I will need to take the initiative and start leading my own projects.

When I apply my program, and use it to settle my head, I tend to do well. I can get confused and disoriented rapidly when I try to do too much too fast and don’t stop, settle, and act with circumspection and deliberation. I need to make sure that I do that here. Use the lessons of sobriety, which have served me so well, in my work here. That’s how I’m able to be happy and free. But using my tools. That’s my twelfth step work. These principles have never guided me wrong. As proof, here I am: sober; sane; trying to figure out how to do my best work at my dream job.