Traveling Sux

Nice. Good looking out, titspig.

I like seeing females running the mo' meeping show like this. Motivated and willing to sacrifice meep to make a future for the sprogs. Two thumbs up for you.

Now TITTIES.

Thats great!

post titties now

I kinda wanna see yer titties, too.

This story would be better if it included photographs of your bare naked chest.

A raise is nice , congratulations,even at the expense of the homelife. Now , please raise our spirits and show your meep! No one else has to know.

Alas, I'm gainfully employed keeping the riffraff off the streets. Plus I know nothing of umpooter admin, though I have an outstanding technical understanding when it comes to virus and spyware removal (-having been infected over and over and over due to my laissez-faire surfing habits.)

Also, may I please see your chest?

Would love to apply but am probably woefully under-qualified for the tier 2 and 3 stuff they're most likely looking for.

Chesticles please

meep or hire me or gtfo.

Congratulations on the raise.

I'm out of town right now, and I have a little down time. So instead of meeping off looking at stupid meep on the internet, I will type...

I am a litigation consultant (I help attorneys communicate to a judge or jury on civil lawsuits - usually patent cases - via PowerPoint, video, animations, etc.) and I can be gone from home on a trial anywhere in the country (and even occasionally abroad) with almost no notice, anywhere from a day to a month or more (though almost without exception the longer the trip, the more notice i get). While out of town, it is not uncommon for me to work in a war room with many attorneys all teaming up on me on for 20 hours a day for the entire length of my trip (once while preparing for a closing argument, I endured over 40 hours of constantly staring into my laptop screen making powerpoint slides). It is exhausting, mentally and physically challenging, but it is also adrenalizing. Sometimes it reminds me of being at camp, as you develop this shared experience with other people in the same situation for a brief period of time.

The longer cases have strained my marriage and my relationship with my daughter. The answer for me has been developing an effort to strive for complete honesty about how important communication (even if only telephonic) is, how a lack of it makes me feel, and to make efforts to communicate exactly what I want from her. I also quietly listen carefully to what she feels and wants, and I make conscious efforts to act on those communications to the best of my ability. I try not to interrupt her when she is talking and think carefully about what she is saying and the context in which it is said.

It wasn't always like that.

For a long time, I always had a hard time telling my wife I was being sent out of town. The nature of my work usually means I can't guarantee that I will be home on an expected day - the finish dates, and I always dread having to make a call telling her I need to stay longer. It is important for me to meet expectations, and I place that at the top of my to-do list. If I say I am going to do something or be somewhere, I make absolutely every effort to do it, and I worry less about pissing off an attorney than breaking a promise to my family. As an example, I am flying home from Texas to California on Thursday morning so we can go out to dinner on Friday night for our 10th anniversary, then I will be on the redeye Saturday night back to Texas. It is very inconvenient to the team and client, but meep'em. She's worth so much more to me than this job.

For the first couple years of the travelling job, my wife, who is very independent, rarely called me while I was out of town. Almost all contacts were initiated by me, and occasionally I would get pissed off or hurt because she wasn't reaching out to me so I wouldn't reach out to her. This was a pattern I noticed in the very early stages of our relationship before I started traveling. I finally let her know very clearly that I NEEDED her to reach out to me, and it didn't mean that I thought she was being needy. I didn't care if she thought i was being needy, because frankly, I was. It helped. It also helped that almost no matter how busy I am on site, I stop whatever I am doing and leave the room to take her calls. Early on, i wasn't so rigorous about this and she told me that by my not being able to take her calls, it made her feel bad and then she was less likely to try again.

The birth of our daughter a couple years ago cemented in me a need to make sure that we were both being open and honest with each other. I've grown a lot because of this and in fact, very recently while on a job that had me in Chicago for several weeks, we had a breakthrough in our communication that gave me what I can best describe as a rebirth in our relationship. After trying to talk during my daughter's waking hours and failing, I started calling her late-late at night (she was 2 hours behind me). We started opening up to each other on levels that I never dreamed I would be able to with anyone - even the marriage therapist from my previous attempt at being married.

I told my wife things I NEVER thought I would ever utter out loud, and she did the same. For about a solid week, I would start my day at about 1pm, call my daughter (3.5y/o) at about 7pm home-time, work until about 11 or 12 at night, then get on the phone for 2 or 3 hours with my wife, unloading thoughts, fears, memories, embarrassments, humiliations, strengths, weaknesses, insecurities, etc, etc, and she did the same, then go back to work until 7 or 8 in the morning.

It was better than any therapy I've ever paid for. When I got home, the connection was so intense it was mindblowing.

I don't know if this would have occurred without my being out of town - I like to think it would have, but who knows.

We aren't talking at the same level on this particular case, and I'm not quite sure why. I feel more exhausted than usual late at night, and she has been recovering from a procedure. I plan to really catch up Thursday and Friday

Traveling for work isn't for everyone. I think that success in it (defined by me as success in work and relationship) comes when both parties in a relationship, if you are in one, are participants in it. It isn't just one person leaves town then comes back. Work and communication with your spouse has to continue even while one is gone. Luckily for me, being out of town seems to have even enhanced that. It doesn't make it easy to go out of town - sometimes I really dread it - but it does make it easier.

On a side note, if you are familiar with basic graphic design, can handle PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop or Flash, and/or are familiar with litigation (e.g. are a paralegal) and have used trial presentation software (Sanction, TrialDirector, etc), and love airports and hotels, and dont mind 100-plus hour works, send me a message. We're a national company and we are hiring. The pay is really good (it can get up to five zeros relatively quickly DOE) but it's a meep of a lot of work and a lot of time on the road. The perks include airline/hotel miles up the meep, a lot of meepty hotel food, all the redbull you can drink, and the opportunity to work with the top litigators in the country on all of the lawsuits that make the front pages of the newspapers.

Hugs.

StartRecordingNow post pics of wifes meep or gtfo.

Hahaha. That heartfelt, wise post chock-full of hard-won insights was made all the more poignant by the subsequent reflexive meepmeepposting. Good work, meepgots.

clothed or topless?

LinkSwarm.com: Poignant subsequent reflexive meepmeepposting.

This IS LinkSwarm.

Traveling on someone elses terms does sux.

It sounds like the opportunity is for a work from home position, but they are building hardware? That doesn't make sense. Shouldn't you be using a cloud provider and letting them worry about the clustering and sys-admin work?

It sounds like there is an irrational hardware hugger in the project team too.

Not building hardware. Need a sys admin who can optimize the hardware with the help of an onsite infrastructureteam member. Sys admin who has experience and can offer insight about VMware; etc.