Anniversaries: Personal & Professional

Monday, June 1st was my 6th-year anniversary with Benjamin. We met 6 years ago on a blind date set up by a mutual friend to see Miss Saigon. We celebrated it by recreating our second date: we had dinner at Schlotzsky’s and then proceeded to see the movie Up which was amazing. Well, technically our second date was dinner at Schlotzsky’s and then dancing lessons at RCC so it wasn’t a total recreation — but neither were we 6 years younger either :) Benjamin did seem to enjoy his dozen + 5 roses.

Tuesday, June 2nd was our 3-year marriage anniversary. To celebrate that we’re seeing Rent next week and staying in a hotel downtown.

Today, June 5th, is my 9-year anniversary at IBM. When I was hired at the peak of the dot-com boom I never thought I’d be at IBM for 5 years, much less 9. During my second performance evaluation roughly 18 months after I started I was told that I was getting a raise, not just because of my good performance but because if they didn’t new hires would be making more than I did. It was then that I discovered that the hiring managers didn’t consider me a strong candidate and weren’t going to offer me the job until one manager stepped in and said he thought I’d be a good fit and would vouch for me. I never did end up working for him though. Thus I was hired at the lowest salary they could offer a college graduate (which was sadly the highest offer I received by far during my job search). Since then I’ve proceeded to impress folks — at least according to my performance evaluations. Here I am 9 years later a well-respected Senior Software Engineer (band 9) and a performance subject-matter expert on all things ITIM, including the IBM LDAP server and DB2 database. It’s been a fun ride! I’m looking forward to an extra week of vacation next year and seeing where IBM’s headed from here.