Yesterday, I got the call. After two interviews — the first of which I was sure I had flubbed, and the second of which I was more comfortable with — and a week of sweating, I finally got an e-mail from the manager I had interviewed with. He told me to give him a call; so I did, and over the telephone he offered me a position as a web developer. I accepted. So in two weeks, I leave Labor Relations at the University, and move over to Information Technology to begin my new job.

Now, I already have a toaster oven, so I didn’t go out and buy one of those. Instead, I took yet another deep step into the depths of true nerd-dom, and took my new credit card to Office Max and bought myself a Palm Pilot Vx. I’ve been lusting after one of these things for months, and the new credit card arrived in the mail today; and I had been planning to use this credit card for just this purchase before putting it away to let it accumulate good credit for me. Of course, this requires some work on my part — namely, actually making payments on my card, something which I have been lax in in years gone by.

Okay, the Palm Pilot is exciting. But what’s more exciting is my new job. I finally get paid to be a web developer. A year after I decided that I definitely did not want to start climbing the University’s administrative ladder, and less than six months after I decided that I wanted to pursue a career as a web developer, and less than two months after I seriously began hunting for a job in the field, I’ve got one. I can’t begin to express how thrilled I am by this development.

This new job will be a slight raise in pay for me as well: not much of one, but the training I’ll be getting through this job — in Oracle, in project management, in programming — is more than worth it. I’ve been dreaming about learning Oracle for months, and it’s really not something you can teach yourself. When I got the call, I excitedly wrote an e-mail to my boss and to my supervisor, giving my two-week notice effective this coming Monday. This means that the next two weeks at my current job are going to be extremely busy, as I put together a desk manual to teach someone else how to process staff and union grievances at the University, and documentation to cover the databases and web applications that I’ve created to make my job easier. And after that, I delve head-first into a brand new job which will probably just about overwhelm me at first, but which I have no doubt I will enjoy and master fairly quickly.

Further updates as events warrant.