Time can be so deceptive. Day by day, it moves so slowly. Year by year, it moves so quickly.

2007 was a hell of a year. We begin the year with myself in Green Bay, working two jobs (RadioShack and Humana) and going to school. There was a strenghening long-distance relationship between myself and Amy, and a seemingly-enervating roommate relationship between myself and Jon. Things started to shake up in February when several things happened.

During the first part of the month, after a series of events and conferring with others, I decided to move early (I was supposed to move in June). The day before my birthday, the serpentine belt in my car (the ‘96 Explorer) went, which caused a day’s worth of downtime for myself. This somehow directly let to my “letting go early” at Humana on my birthday. Granted they did know I was leaving early, but it still sucked. I sadly had to leave the Green Bay RadioShack (go store 6263!), which was a great job.

On March 3, I was an official resident of Grafton. I was transferred to the RadioShack on 76th and Capital, which was quite the experience. The first several weeks were spent just getting used to the completely different culture that existed there. Once I got over that, I was much better. Everyone was cool there, and it was a blast working at the top-performing store in the Milwaukee market. My schooling was also transferred from the Green Bay ITT to Greenfield.

That first quarter at ITT Greenfield was unique in the fact that the main class was Capstone. Basically Capstone is a summary class of everything you learned in all of the previous quarters. The task we were assigned was to create a WAN network for a ficticious company. We needed all the project paperwork, the pricing, the diagrams, and a live system setup to demo after the presentation (which needed to be 45 minutes). Just that sounds quite daunting for any college student. I had the added bonus of not knowing anyone in the class (when normally, people in the class have seen each other more often than not in the past two years of their schooling). I decided to embrace the situation, and give it my best shot. By week 3, there was a unanimous vote by the group (and the teacher) to replace the original group leader with myself. The rest of that quarter was incredibly fun. I got to know my classmates very well, and we completed our project with great success (exempting the lack-of-work from “Drewcifer”, a classmate who spent his time playing WoW at school and turning in crappy work).

April comes around, and I’m itching for a new job. I was going to have my degree in a couple months, and I wanted a job that recognized that achievement. I had been looking around for quite a bit, but nothing really popped out at me. Until one morning RJ sends me a text message asking me if I’d be interested in a networking job. I reply with a definitive yes. A few more messages are exchanged and I suddenly have an interview scheduled at his work, Brooks Stevens. Less than a week later, I’m in a meeting room, sitting across the table from Kipp, the President of the company, and Scott, a Lead Engineer. I hand over my skillfully-crafted resume (with help from the Career Services guys from ITT Green Bay), and we talk for awhile. RJ comes in and he basically explains what he does. I’m asked if I have any other questions, and then I leave. I drive home (which was about 4 minutes at that time), go upstairs to change, and come back downstairs to a missed call from RJ at work. I call him back and he tells me to call Scott immediately. I call him, and a job offer was made right there. A job acceptance was made at the same time. I turned in my two-weeks notice at RadioShack (which was met with great resistance–they really wanted me to stay there!), and spent a week working with RJ to learn the in’s and out’s of the network I’d be taking over. I had my job in the field. I was in Grafton, and therefore closer to friends.

Oh yes, there’s always my Employee Initiation, which occurred the first day I worked by myself..

To keep with tradition of the year so far, and after a long discussion at a Friday night Webb’s, I decide it’s time to look into a new set of wheels. I had a new job which I knew would provide enough income for car payments. I started some intense research for a couple weeks, and ended up landing on my 2007 Focus ZX5. The purchasing process was humorous because of a clerical error–I signed the papers for an ‘05 Focus that I had test driven about a week before I decided on the other car. There was the slight inconvenience of staying a little bit longer to resign the papers, but the major convenience of getting a hell of a deal because they just took the price for the other car and tacked on a grand or so and called it a deal. I even got 6 tickets to a theme park in Wisconsin Dells (which was sadly not used).

June was a relatively slow month. Gotcha! Rumors started spreading around at work. There were whispers of a merger or a buyout. As time progressed in this arena, we learned that we were merging with a company named Ingenium out of Allenton, WI. In the midst of several managers leaving the company, I became quite worried about the existance of my job. Since technically the other company was going to have more of the managerial muscle in the post-merger company, I assumed that my days were short (they already had an IT guy, why would they need two?). (Spoiler Alert: This wasn’t the case!)

July is here, and the warranty on my old Inspiron 9100 expires. I wanted to use the warranty one last time to replace some worn parts on the laptop, but I was late by only a couple days. I did some laptop shopping for the next week or so, and soon had ordered a new laptop. I now had an Inspiron 1520.

Fast-forward two months, and the merger has been announced and sealed. My job still exists, and I’m presented with the fact that I have a huge integration project that I need to start right away. This project basically consumed my existance for the next 4 months. The plan was as follows: take the 3 separate networks of the merged companies (Allenton has two locations) and skillfully integrate them into one big happy WAN. If only it were simple enough to summarize in one sentence. There was domain renaming, IP address converting, confusion and despair towards SBS, several trips to St. Paul, the rise and fall of ISA Server, lots of typing, and somewhere in there the opening and embracing of Qdoba in Grafton. Plenty of 70+ hour weeks, plenty of weekends completely shot, and plenty of times where I wouldn’t see roommates for weeks at a time because I returned home from work so late.

Finally comes December and my project is wrapping up. I approach fringe-burnout-stage in the middle of the month, only to be greeted with the holidays–lots of time off. Now that the break is coming to a close, I’m very much revived and ready for whatever work can throw at me now (there’s plenty of work ahead of me, such as finishing up little things here and there which didn’t survive the conversion, as well as research and integrating a new phone system. I’ll also have a likely move from our Grafton office to an expanded Allenton office sometime.

December also marks another change: moving once again. The lease expired and it was time to find a new place. After doing some slightly-last-minute research, I finally settled on a new place in Menomonee Falls. It’s right off Appleton and close to the freeway. While a 4 minute to drive is nice, the drive from my new place won’t be too bad (20-30 minutes).

So I go from a RadioShack dude with a job at Humana up in Green Bay to an IT Lead with a new cell phone, car, laptop, job, and place to live.

Yes, it has been quite the year for 2007. I’m looking forward to 2008. To being closer to Amy (finally!), closer to friends, future job plans (not nearly as intensive as my last project).

2007, you were definitely a year of change. Hopefully 2008 will be a bit more “stable.”

~Jaker