Getting A New Job - Prior to Moving

 Hey guys!

I'm not entirely sure why I wanted to write this post since it's kind of irrelevant now that I am no longer working in that position but I like keeping you guys informed about my life a little! So probably like this time last year, I was approached by my boss that there could be a new opportunity for me in a different department. The County hadn't fully made up their minds if the position was needed but they wanted to test me out and see if I could be of extra help. The new role would be in the department that I had wanted to work in for probably like a year or more at least but at the time there were only two spots in this department. One of the spots was going to be empty soon because someone was retiring and I was hoping that I would be getting that position but they ended up approaching someone else about it and not even offering it to anyone else. At the time I thought this was extremely unfair but then again when my turn came I thought it was totally fair and I was super happy that I was the only one being suggested for the position.

Anyways, I had to do a trial run with the new department where they assigned me a project and I had to get it done in two days. My current supervisors were not happy that they would be losing me at all so they were kind of uncooperative and kind of gave me and what would become my future boss some attitude. In my opinion this is to be expected seeing as how obviously no one wants to lose a great, hard working employee because it opens you up to a lot of anxiety about trying to find someone to replace that person who is equally as good. But I did my trial run and I did everything that was asked of me even though the instructions for this task were horrible and made no sense. I did my absolute best and they told me I did a fantastic job!

After about a month or so they finally came to me and said that the position was approved and that they would be giving me the role if I would like to take it. I said yes and then like another month later I finally started! Things tend to take a long time at the County. There is no easy transition and nothing is done quickly. I started my new role at the end of last August and I ended up leaving the first day of April this year. I was only in the role about 7 months and I wish I could have stayed a little bit longer or gone to work remotely but at the same time there were some toxic things happening around me which I will not go into detail about because I don't know who might end up reading this someday but I definitely left at a good time. 

Honestly, I was starting to crack because of some of the stuff that was going on. I think I have mentioned in earlier posts about how I worked with one of my family members and all of this toxic stuff involved this family member. I don't really know much about it since I left but I do know that this family member is no longer in my family and hopefully they never will be again. Unfortunately for me if I ever need to return back to that workplace, I just don't know if I could because of what was going on. I kept telling my mom all the time that I wish I could just leave and that I didn't want to be around it or involved anymore. I definitely learned my lesson not to work with a family member again. I did enjoy the investigative work I did to help find out more information about what was going on though. But at the same time, I was getting worried that eventually I might end up getting brought down in all of the drama that didn't even involve me. 

So back to the new job, it was basically like working in IT except we didn't actually work for the IT department. We were kind of Front End Software developers except I only had minor coding experience so I didn't really handle any of this part, my boss did and the other girl that we worked with she didn't have any coding experience when she started but our boss had been able to teach her a few things before I had started so she was kind of starting to help out when I started. She was supposed to eventually teach me as well and we were supposed to be this great power team which I was very sad to leave but timing is everything. There were also very many other tasks that we took care of such as website management for the webpages of 9 different County Departments, we took care of creating new processes for the same departments as well, and we also managed the customer portal where they would go to apply for permits. 

This was basically my dream job! It was a lot of work and I learned a lot in such a short amount of time but I think it probably would have taken me at least 2-3 years before I actually felt comfortable in the role and I really hate that feeling. I want to be able to go to work and know exactly what I am doing and that I am doing it correctly. I hate feeling like I have to ask permission for things or for my work to be reviewed because I probably missed something because in this role everything was trial and error. I am currently trying to find a job similar to what I did in this role but it's really challenging because we had so many jobs tied into the one role. For example, we had a weekly schedule where we would have to schedule out what we were working on each day. We hardly stuck to the schedule due to emergencies that would come up or people coming over to our desk to ask us for a "quick" favor and that it needed to be done by the end of the day but it was actually like a 3 hour long project and they would come to us when we only had 2 hours left in the day. 

I ended up working a lot of overtime in this position which kind of sucked but was nice when I got my paycheck! Thankfully I was hourly and got paid an overtime rate whenever I went over my 8 hour shift. I typically worked anywhere from 1 hour to 3 hours of overtime in a day. Some days were definitely worse than others but somedays I would just get up and leave because I didn't want to be at work anymore. I also had a bit of flexibility with this job because I could flex my time so if I worked 4 hours of overtime for the week I could take a half day on Friday if I wanted to which really nice whenever we traveled to Orlando. I could also work from home some days. Towards the end my coworker and I that were kind of equal to each other, we ended up doing every other day at home and then both in office on Fridays. We always had a ton of meetings on Fridays which was really nice because it made the day go by super fast but it also meant having to stay late sometimes because we weren't actually able to get any of our normal work done. 

I think that pretty much sums up my old job and hopefully I will find something that I enjoy just as much or even more. I don't really have too many pictures from the actual job but here was the going away party they threw me on my last day! 

Thanks for stopping by!

XO, Steph