And Then, I Received a Sign.

 So, yeah. I took today off to prep for the garage cleanout on Wednesday. My Garage Guy will be here Wednesday morning and I needed to get into the awful "workbench" thing to see if I'd left anything actually useful in there. 

I did not. 

I realize that other than being grubby my garage isn't like an episode of Hoarders or anything, so anyone stumbling across this backwater blog may be puzzled about why I hired a guy to deal with it.  There's some heavy, bulky crap I can't lift that needs to go, but it's mainly the tear out of that absurd "workbench" or whatever it's supposed to be. 

There's no shelving behind those doors. There's no power or lighting. It takes up space that could be used for actual sturdy metal shelving for actual useful storage. My shit has been sitting in boxes on the garage floor for years, and I'm finally going to do something about it. I've hated it since I moved here but always had other spending priorities. So it's finally going to go, and then I'll get shelving from Costco, and maybe even a smallish garage fridge. But enough about the garage.

While I was running errands I got a text from my boss, apologizing for interrupting my day off and asking if I could give her a call later, then later said she'd scheduled a team call for noon. So my curiosity was aroused, but I figured it was a corporate announcement and probably didn't directly affect me. 

So, yeah, it's was a corporate announcement. A "minor restructuring". I still have a job, but...without getting too much into the details, the boss I've had since 2015 is no longer my boss, and my new manager is someone I've never met in another part of the country. This is all effective THURSDAY, as in April 16th. I don't talk about what I do, but it's fairly specialized work and it's focused in FL, so yeah, it makes perfect sense to have me report to a stranger in another state who has never done what I do.

To clarify: this isn't just about ME, it's about the type of work I do, there are lots of us in several states. But the way we do it in FL doesn't resemble the way they do it in the other states, and vice versa, so this genius management move disregards the specialized knowledge we accumulated through years of experience and makes us all just "one team" that has nothing at all in common.  Instead of leaving us attached to the state level work we do, we're now reporting to someone detached from the specialized issues we deal with. Cool, right? 

Nobody's happy. There's really no justification for it that we can discern, my boss was pretty outspoken that she's NOT happy, but yeah, here we are. 

As I've said I've made no secret that I've been contemplating my exit strategy for a while, so when asked my opinion, I said this maybe the sign I've been waiting for that it's time to pick a date and stick with it. The entire team was just, "Yup." 

So, I'm going with June 30 as my last day, unless they piss me off further. I'm salaried, I don't even need to give two weeks notice, but I also don't want to leave the people I work with and genuinely like screwed over. But yeah, today was the sign I can't ignore.