So it’s been almost a week since you’ve seen anything on this here blog or twitter get updated.

There’s a reason for that: I started my new job Tuesday.

With the new job comes a new office with new rules and new people. Here’s the skinny so far:

• It’s 78 miles from our driveway to my new office :0( (I have to work in Greensboro for a couple of months, and then my drive will be much shorter).
• In 78 miles, I do not pass a single Starbucks :0(
• There is free coffee at work :0)
• The free coffee at work is terrible :0(
• There is a cafeteria at work where I can buy better coffee :0)
• That coffee is also pretty terrible :0(
• The pens at work are very nice :0)
• I am not allowed to use iTunes anymore :0(
• I am not allowed to use Twitter anymore :0(
• I am not allowed to use Facebook anymore :0(
• So far I have listened to three sermons, one episode of ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’, and half an episode of “This American Life” on the road to and from work :0)
• My blog is not on the list of stuff I’m not allowed to mess with at work :0)
• It takes me about 10 minutes to walk from my car to my cube :0|
• They give out free newspapers at the door :0)
• The cubes at work are very short, so we can stand up and see each other :0)
• The office is always freezing cold :0(
• I walk through a huge factory where they make gas pumps on the way to my cube :0)
• They have assigned me a very nice, very patient brother in Christ to teach me everything I need to know :0)
• My first day my teammates took me out to lunch and we ended up collectively witnessing to out manager the whole time :0) :0) :0)

I’ll have to update you some more when there’s time!

]]> http://zackriesland.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/zaney-acrobatic-charismatic-kicker/feed/ 0 zackriesland http://zackriesland.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/whats-been-happening/ http://zackriesland.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/whats-been-happening/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:01:01 +0000 Zack http://zackriesland.wordpress.com/?p=444 ]]>

Money got really tight for us around Christmas time. We put a few gift purchases on our credit cards, and fully expected that when our tax refund came, we would pay down our credit card bills and put a little money in the bank, and start with a positive financial momentum in 2008.
Trouble was, we came up owing almost $1,000 on our taxes. I re-did the numbers twice, and yet Turbo Tax was insistent: we owed the IRS money we didn’t have.
So much for a positive momentum…
But then it got worse.

I was working like a dog at the time, and fully expecting to get a raise that I was up for in December. At our company, raises will often come a couple of months late, but they’re usually retroactive to whenever you were eligible. So when I sat down in my manager’s office in March, I was expecting to get a good raise that would be retroactive to mid-December. Or in other words, I thought for sure that God would use this to help us pay our tax debt by the looming deadline.
But that’s not what happened.

I got the raise I expected, but my manager told me that it wouldn’t be retroactive. I was kind of puzzled, and I asked if I was being punished for something. He said that I wasn’t. That I was doing a great job, and something along the lines of “this is just how we’re doing it.”
That left me pretty discouraged.
So we put our tax debt on a credit card. So much for paying that thing down…

And then my brakes went out. So I put those on the credit card.
And then our home owner’s association dues came. Can’t pay those on a credit card, so I paid some other bills on a credit card so we could write a check for that.

And I started to carry some serious anxiety, and thought that surely if I trusted the Lord through this and was obedient He would come through in some supernatural way.

That’s about the time we got a bill for our baby. No, you’re right — the baby hasn’t been born yet. It was actually only 10 weeks in the womb when we got our bill. The doctor’s office informed us that they had negotiated with our insurance, and our portion of the cost would be about $2,000. We could feel free to bring it to our next appointment in 2 weeks.

At this point, I was pretty discouraged.

I was more than discouraged.

I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders.

1/3 of the year down, and we have spent more than we’ve made just about every week. Way to go, Zack. Don’t you deserve the ‘Provider of the Year’ award…

Then May rolled around. I got an extra paycheck in May, because I get payed every two weeks, which means that I get two paychecks a year that don’t fall into the ‘twice a month’ pattern.

Then, a week later, we got our tax rebate check.

Just like that, $3,000 that our budget wasn’t counting on. And God gave us some room to breathe.

But that’s not all that happened.

I got a call from a recruiter who asked me if I was interested in a job. This is important because I didn’t apply for anything (except a couple spots at SAS, but that’s another story). I didn’t put my resume on anything but this blog right here. Not on Monster or JobFinder or anything else.

He couldn’t explain where he got my resume except that it turned up in his database.

As it turned out, the position he described was a somewhat unstable, contractor position that seemed like a bad idea with a baby coming.

So I turned it down.

And asked God to stop teasing me.

But then he called back and asked if I would be interested in taking the same position as a full-time salary position. Good pay, but I’d have to commute to Greensboro.

Gas is $4 a gallon. And I have a baby coming.

“No thanks.” Hang up. “God, please stop teasing me!”

A week goes by and he calls back again. “What if you could have the same job, but work from Raleigh?”

So I drove all the way to Greensboro to interview… for 4 hours.

Came home, and waited for the call.

For three weeks.

“God, this really isn’t funny. I’ll gladly keep the situation I’m in, but please stop teasing me.”

But He wasn’t. The call came last week.

To be continued…

Amazon.com called this week and asked me if I’d be interested in doing a job interview.

I haven’t applied for anything with them, and I have no idea how they got my resume, but it got me kind of excited.

I’ll be doing a phone interview this Thursday. Please pray that the Lord will guide it and give me wisdom about this!

One of the best things about Mondays at my office is that we get free donuts (usually).

Yesterday, I ate this particular one… it came in a box that had several more just like it. This indicates to me that it was not an accident that only half of the donut has sprinkles.

Someone actually went out of their way to intentionally put sprinkles on exactly half of this thing… does that make sense to anyone?

Would sprinkling the whole thing put the sugar content so high that it would be downright inhumane to sell these things…

Help me out…

This the main toilet for the guys here at my office.

And this is the condition I usually find it in…

Work with me people.

What’s your office pet peeve?

So, you might have noticed that you didn’t see much shaking on ZackRiesland.com this week…

There’s a reason for that. The short explanation is that I worked about 10 hours of overtime. If you’re interesting in what’s been going on in my head this week, or if you’re a fan of dilbert, or if you’re just bored, then please, read on…

This all started with the new year. Even though I haven’t listed it with my official ‘resolutions’, I have committed to work harder when I’m at work. I believe that I was giving more than enough before, but I think I was approaching work with the wrong attitude — or the wrong perspective.

I think I basically felt like my job was something I had to go do in order to pay the bills, but it was sort of ‘external’ to the rest of my life. I put on my ‘I want to be like Jesus’ hat when I woke up in the morning, but seemed to take it off early in the work day — presumably so that I would have the strength to put it back on after I left.

Over the course of the year, I think God really convicted me that this is really hypocritical, and a waste of the most obvious ministry He had given me: the one where I spend at least 40 hours a week.

So I committed going into ‘08 that I would work as hard as I could, and try to let my work AND my attitude reflect Christ, and trust God to give me enough energy and joy to come home and still love Stephanie well.

So it’s three weeks in… and I’m struggling.

Wednesday afternoon, my team leader asked me to meet with him for a minute. Our conversation went something like this,

Him: “Zack, as you can see from these numbers, we’re not going to meet our commitments for this week.”

Me: “Commitments for this week? I thought we only made monthly commitments.”

Him: “Well, we do, but I broke our monthly commitments down into weekly ones, so that we can make sure we meet our monthly ones.”

Me: “Oh. So what are our commitments for this week?”

Him: “This stuff.”

Me: “Gee. I wish I had known that, ’cause I don’t think me or the rest of the team have been going on that understanding.”

Him: “Yeah. I know. The team seems to follow your direction, which is why I need you to get everyone excited about meeting the commitments for this week.”

Me: “This amount of work isn’t reasonable for one week. You make it sound like we’re falling behind, but we’re working really hard and really efficiently. It’s just not a reasonable amount of work.”

Him: “Well, it would be nice if we lived in a perfect world, but we don’t. This has to get done this week. It won’t always be this way.”

Me: “Well. There are two days left, and it looks like we have at least three days of work to do.”

Him: “Exactly. So how will you motivate the team to get the work done?”

(awkward silence)

Him: “For example, you could work extra today and tomorrow and Friday, or you could work this weekend… you have options.”

You get the idea… I left pretty frustrated, especially considering that I already had a few hours of overtime in at that point.

Then it got worse…

I came home, and let’s just say that Stephanie was very unhappy about the prospect of me working over the weekend. And then I found out that she had plans for a “Lady’s Night Out” Friday night. So I thought, ‘win-win’. I’ll just work really late Friday and then I hopefully won’t have to work over the weekend.

So Friday, I’m at the office, and I get called in to another meeting.

Them: “Zack, we heard that you’re not planning to work this weekend.”

Me: “No. But I’m hopefully going to get everything done tonight.”

Them: “You have a lot of work to do.”

Me: “I know. I’ll stay as late as I need to. My wife needs me this weekend.”

Them: “We’ve decided that you wouldn’t have this problem if you worked more hours throughout the week. We’ve determined that you will need to work at least 52 hours next week to get all your work done. How do you plan to split that up over 5 days so that we don’t have this problem again?”

So yesterday morning I left the house at 8:30 am and I got home from work at 11:30 pm. No lunch break. No dinner break. And not even a pat on the back. I got reprimanded.

And the sucker punch of it all is that I think this is the thanks I get for demonstrating what I can do when I work really hard.

So that’s the week I’ve had, and the week I’m looking forward to next week.

I know this is from the Lord, and that there’s plenty to learn in this.

I keep thinking about the scripture that says ‘If someone bids you to go one mile with them, go two.’ Jesus said this at a time when the law allowed a Roman soldier to force a citizen to cary something for them for up to one mile. It didn’t matter whether the person was busy — if a soldier forced you to help, you had to drop everything and help.
I really think the point of Jesus’ teaching was, “When someone inconveniences you, assume that it’s from the Lord, and go along with it with a good attitude.”

It’s been really convicting these past couple of weeks to see how bad I can be at that.

The upside has been that Steph has been very supportive. She brought me french toast in bed this morning, and we went for a long walk, and… did other things that husbands and wives do.

Please pray for me this week. I really want to be a good witness through this….

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