Back in the Saddle

Well, I have been called out of my blessed retirement and cajoled into working for a living again. Rats. Just as I was getting used to life as a Country Gentleman of Leisure.

It was all so unexpected as well — yesterday at 2pm I casualy extended a finger and pressed an “Apply for this Job” button, and by 7pm I’d been interviewed and had signed a contract. Huh … actually a total of 3 hours between click and being accepted, with the rest just being paperwork.

Interesting stuff, anyway. “Business Intelligence Architect”, designing a system for external and internal reporting of network alerts and alarms for a major telecommunications company. The really interesting part is that the duties are not just on the Oracle data warehouse design side, but also include the reporting environment and ETL functionality. It is so much more satisfying to mentally flick between “Ah hah … so this metric is required …” into “Well it’ll have to be stored in such-and-such a way” on to “In that case the ETL wil have to …”. A real synthesis of thought processes.

Also, that’s a heck of a lot of paperwork I’ll be spitting out.

The actual development will be offshore and the designs will be subject to approval by the client of course. It should be a wild ride.

Curiously, the consultancy for the work is the UK branch of the company I was a full-time consultant to from 2002 through 2006, when I was in Ohio and Colorado. Coincidence, but another interesting facet.

Not withstanding my new employment status, I’ll still be off to Spain for two weeks at the end of August. I feel like I’ll be ready for it by then.