Yesterday, Wednesday, August 16, 2017, was an amazing day. Karen, the kids, and I left North Liberty at 7:07 AM for Cedar Falls in 3 vehicles. I drove the Ford, Megan drove her Nissan Sentra (with Alex as navigator extraordinaire), and Karen drove a 2018 Chevy Traverse. It is a $46000ish vehicle that Billion Auto loaned to us while they work on the air conditioner of our Chevy Equinox.
But that's a story for another post.
When we arrived in Cedar Falls, we unloaded all three vehicles. I was happy and somewhat surprised to see the UNI men's basketball coach - Ben Jacobsen - and several of the members of the team helping with the moving in process.
We worked until noon, which is when I was back in the Ford and heading back to my job. I had a meeting at 4 that was very crucial to the work I've been doing since I started here. It was with my manager's manager and a couple of other senior leadership team members and an IT audit firm. Let me be blunt: I crushed it! I gave a brief demo of my RoboHelp project and talked about how I am doing my work, how I have the disaster recovery plan split into five phases, about how I am linking to PDF files and Excel files instead of converting them to another format, about how there is an index in the browser-based help, about how we are leveraging existing documentation that other teams create / maintain to create the documentation, about how a driving principle is to not have two versions of the content (one that is in the DR doc and one that the server teams use on a daily basis), and about how there are placeholders for the critical systems that are assigned priorities 2 through 4 (I have been focusing on the 16 priority 1 systems).
When describing the meeting to my friend Matthew, he said the phrase "professional vindication" which I really like. I have always been fully supported by my co-workers in the approach to my work, but to hear someone from outside the organization say, "You are on the right path" raises my stock and my value. I walked out of the meeting higher than a kite! But I refuse to rest on my laurels - there is a lot of work to be done...
