A month ago, I was busy scurrying about, getting a scanner hooked up to do some scanning of materials for OSG, for website content. I was also looking at PocketPC’s, as I had been charged to go get one so that I could include PDA-compatibility in my Website development. We were not sure as to where the precise sources of support were to come, but I was confident, especially that there woulod be quick, tangible and important additions to the OSG online prescence. Later that day, I got an email informaing me that the Contractor position was available again (there had been an opening a couple months back for which I had applied but not been chosen, but had run a close third. The first person turned out to be unreliable and simply stopped showing up, and the second worked 4 weeks and then got a great paying job, and so he was leaving.

I actually didn’t respond to this email, but was called on the phone the following Monday, the 14th. I had, on the 9th, been so convinced that the OSG thing was already “happening” as a full-time role for me (at about $450 a week—sources as yet unknown) , but I felt the “kairos” in this, and was filled with a sense of “this is the thing”; the “thing” that will become the Web Prescence and Web “PLace” from which my dreams have come over the past 5 years.

When I got the call, my initial internal response was, “Why NOW?”, but the fact that they had made this second effort seemed be a wake up call for me, that perhaps God was saying to me, “Maybe you need this”. It was, in fact, an opportunity to learn Cold Fusion, which I had been realizing would be a good addition to my skills. So many of the jobs out there were looking for someone with those skills. They realized that my ASP and SQL experience would make it a rather uncomplicated transition to Cold Fusion, but I was a tad under-experienced with Stored Procedures and T-SQL coding, and had no experience at all with Access VBA or Java (which was going to be needed soon). They said “We’ll give you a try”. Everybody in my family was estatic, and when I pointed out that this was a kind of “trial period”, everyone seemed to be of the mind that there would be no problem for me to make the grade. This is a good thing, to have encouragers.

But I knew that this could be a trying time. There are databases , much of which are accounting data, and I saw as I began to be “shown around” that this accounting database, done in Access on the front end, and stored in SQLServer on the backend and filled with Business Rules in a multitude of Stored Procedures, that this was going to be difficult to simply “slide in”. And if the existing development folks are not as pateint as they need to be with my “getting the lay of the land” and learning where things are, that it may be a short stay.

I guess I have no right to specify how far this patience for training shoud extend. It is not my place to stipulate how “urgent” it is, or how “fast” things need to get done. There were a couple of tasks that I worked on that I felt were taking me too long from their perspective (In other words, I felt the awkward silence that seemed to be saying “I can’t believe you’re still struggling with that”). In my previous fulltime position, the technical pace was much less pressurized. Since I was the only developer in my department, the requested features did not have a prior “turn-around time” expectation. Such are the trials and tribulations of the Web developer profession.