This is kind of a weird time of year for me.  There’s a lot of mixed emotions for me during this time of year as birthdays are just weird for me.  Every year, I contemplate going home for labor day weekend to kind of spend my birthday with my parents, or just wishing they were here (but usually don’t since it’s just not worth driving for just the weekend).  Birthdays have usually just been a celebration with my family.  When I think back on previous birthdays, I can really only point to one and say "yeah, it was fantastic!".  It’s not that I’ve had shitty birthdays, they just weren’t all that memorable.Also every year, I get a little freaked out about how I’m nowhere near where I had planned nor wanted to be professionally, nor in my personal life.

I keep being asked what I want to do for my birthday, and I have absolutely no freaking idea what I want to do.  I don’t like planning or figuring that type of thing out at all.

This time of year also becomes a bit harder for me as we near 9/11.  Yep, I will fully admit that I probably am a bit PTSD from that, but not in a way that prohibits me from doing anything, or impacts how I live my life.  It’s just something that lingers in my mind, and always will.  It actually took one year almost exactly after 9/11/01 before I didn’t cry just at the mere thought of it.  I think a day rarely goes by that I don’t actually have a passing thought of it.  I know this is a weird post, but it’s kind of just what is on my mind.

Even after 2 days/nights of being with friends and enjoy life, I still feel the frustration of this past week taking its toll still.  Its week like these that remind that there is still a huge disconnect between myself and my boss.  His reality checks keep bouncing as far as what my work load is like, or how competent the rest of the team (save one person, J) isn’t.   I’m so bored and unchallenged in my job currently, that I’m desperately seeking change.  I’m the type of worker that is constantly looking for a challenging project to take on, even if I have to "invent" one.  I keep telling him this….I’m not sure how many times I’ve flat out told him that I’m bored out of my mind in my job. In that time, he’s managed to find _one_ challenging project for me to takeover.  I’ve found a couple of others in that time on my own, and thankfully, they’ve been deemed "high priority".  However, because of the aforementioned incompetency of teammates, I’ve spent 1.5 days worth of time on this latest project.  I’ve had to twice tell the PM to push the deadline for completion back 3 days.  Having to do this, makes me incredibly pissy.  Finally, on Friday, I’d just about how my fill of the incompetency when the "engineer" on duty spent 2.5 days looking into a problem.  The problem was of course then handed off to me.   This was one of the few times that the engineer actually knew more about it than I did….and I tried explaining that, but still got handed it.  At this point, I was fairly pissed off and fed up, so I took the "issue" and without any prior info from the "engineer" fixed it in a matter of an hour.  WTF DID HE DO FOR 2.5 DAYS!  And *I* GUESSED at the solution.  This pissed me off even _more_ than the fact that I’d had yet another issue being dropped on me because people lack troubleshooting/problem solving skills.

Some of this I think is me…I really do assume that anyone in a technical field has a certain level of logical thinking and problem solving.  What is incredibly simple and evident to me, is just clearly not to others.  It was told to me recently that I seriously underestimate my skills and abilities, especially in my resume.  The term "SME" (Subject Matter Expert) has come up multiple times, and often as a description of my skillset in my current position.  I hate this term, and I hate even more when someone says that I am one.  I am not an expert.  An expert, to me, implies that I have nothing more (or very little) to learn about a specific subject.  In the areas which I’m considered a SME, I still have massive amounts to learn.  The only thing I’ll admit to, is that I have a good understanding of the basic end to end functionality of our platform.  I don’t think that makes me a SME though.