Tierra Encantada

Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Work Never Ends June 21, 2007

I didn't realize it's been over a year since I posted anything. I don't even know where the time went to be honest. It seems the older I get, the faster time seems to pass by.

I have spent the last year mostly working. At my job, we've converted to a new accounting system, with little training and little communication from those that implemented the system. This is a major government wide conversion, so you can imagine how huge this is at a price tag of over $30M. Preparing for conversion and everything else involved with this has felt overwhelming at times. Implementation came with training that consisted of watching someone click through a presentation and following along in a manual, which we found out had incomplete or incorrect or missing processes when we actually had to go into a live system to use it. There have been plenty of bugs that system administrators have had to work on and it's still not operating optimally. The reporting features are horrible and the promised training on query writing was never actually offered. Needless to say, being someone who grasps most computer related stuff fairly quickly and has no fear of trying things out, I have spent most of the last year troubleshooting, helping everyone else to fix things and keep the work flow going, teaching them what I learned and as a result we are doing better than most agencies. It's been almost a year since going live and its mostly better, but still not great. The fact that users were blamed for any delays in processing in the press has left me disillusioned with politics, as if I wasn't already. lol Our executive, aka the Governor, line item vetoed funding approved by the legislature to do an internal control IT audit in the system. So, we have no executive support and no clue whether the system works the way it should or whether the numbers we generate are accurate. I am not an accountant by education, but I know this is not a good thing. Our auditor just backed out on doing our audit and who could blame them? They can't verify accuracy anymore than we can. I won't rant on because, well, there's nothing I can do about it. But Governor, if you read this, some real support would be nice. :o)

At home, I've been working as well. My dad has been helping me to remodel the house that was my grandparents. I actually never expected to move back to the Land of Enchantment after college, but life brought me back. After both grandparents passed away, I couldn't imagine strangers inhabiting their property. My parents felt the same and bought the property and handed it over to me. How can I ever repay my parents for giving me a house? I am the luckiest girl in the world, although I'd trade the house to have my grandparents back in a heartbeat.

I was the only one willing to live there and put the money into remodeling. The whole project has taken about 4 years, off and on, and consisted of basically gutting the house and guest house and redoing everything. I've learned a lot from my dad about all things involved in construction and I can never repay him enough for all the time and effort and great love he put into every single thing he did. Both my parents are amazing and probably way too generous with me. Hopefully, over time, I can give back to them some of what they have given to me.

We're finally at the end of the remodeling and I'm starting to move my stuff in and hopefully I will have more time to get back to writing here. There's still work to be done on the outside, especially landscaping, but I finally get to live there. :o) My dog has already made himself at home. Maybe I can post pictures once there aren't boxes stacked all over the place. I think people who know what it looked like before will be amazed. I wish I had more before pictures to compare.

I probably sound spoiled and I would not blame you for thinking that. How many people have parents like mine? I promise I am always grateful, never expecting them to do the things they do, and never taking advantage of them. I try to be as generous with them because they mean the world to me, although it seems like it could never really be enough. Anyway, this has a point, so stay tuned for my next post. :o)

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