TSQL Tuesday #44 Second Chances

It always comes to me as a surprise that it is TSQL Tuesday again. I guess time just slips by so quickly these days.  This fine month of July is brought to us by Bradley Ball, got to love his handle (SQLBalls) [  BLOG  |   TWITTER  ]. If you haven’t heard about or figured out what this Tuesday stuff is all about drop me a line and I will not only sell you on the concept I will convince you to write your first post for next month.

I have sat around the camp fire so to speak and listened to my great peers tell me stories of deleting entire columns of data by accident and recovering, dropping indexes they didn’t mean to and the rebuild was hell, finding out that your backups didn’t work and I mean the list goes on. Sure over a glass of wine and many years under the bridge they can sit and laugh. I just don’t have any fun stories to tell you like that.

Second chances. Of course this is supposed to be a SQL post about something that I have literally screwed up and gotten a second chance on. For starters there are not a lot of those types of mistakes and in my defense it’s not that I am that good it is that I am that scared. You try starting out your SQL career when the guy you are dating is the Windows Server Admin & SQL Server DBA. I am not trying to play bash Kerry but there is certainly no room for mistakes with him. I have to tell you that to this day it makes my palms sweat when I have to do some crazy data zap (that is what we call deleting/inserting data at my company) or some other highly risky thing. I make sure to test everything I possibly can and if I don’t know about something I do the research. I never even challenge people when I know they are wrong until I have confirmed that I understand the concept. So here is not where I can tell you any great story of falling on my sword, deleting tons of data, dropping tables or anything of the like.

Second chance at a happy life. At a previous position I was pretty beat down. I worked for management that wanted head bobs and total agreement from their staff no matter what the request was. I am not that person. If you are going to break shit I am going to tell you that is a bad idea and why. I was treated very poorly for a couple years and had many other folks in that department basically ask me how I even got out of bed in the morning. I was depressed, over eating, over sleeping if I ever got to sleep and frustrated. When you are frustrated you come across to others as angry but I really wasn’t. Sure I needed to vote with my feet but in that town there wasn’t a lot of hope for that. Besides I worked at one of those places in town that everyone wanted to work. Kerry and I knew that we were going to need to move in order to find jobs that we wanted and opportunity to grow. We were going to a need a market that had many opportunities for this to be a good long term solution.  Of course he drug his feet and we really had not picked a state to consider let alone a city. We knew that Louisville and Cleveland were supposed to be hopping markets. Kerry would love to live in Boston or a big city. I would love to live in the desert. You see how this isn’t going to work well. One day something happened at work to really piss him off. I remember being mostly asleep when he slammed the laptop lid closed and said “Well that is done!”. Of course I had not 1 clue what he was talking about and found out that he had finally put his resume on line. Two weeks later he had a job offer in Nashville, TN.

Of course we had narrowed things down to really liking Nashville, it’s close enough to home and yet still far enough away. That next year was pretty much a version of hell that has clearly changed me forever. You see I got to stay back home and take care of 2 houses, 2 dogs, 2 yards and a swimming pool. I sold the house in 14 days after getting it ready to sell. I packed my own belongings with the intent of not needing them so putting them in storage would be fine. HA! I had to dig out winter clothes and then again summer ones. It was a long year that finally came to an end when we had secretly found a house and had scheduled closing on. We really didn’t tell too many folks as we were not sure that they would actually give Kerry a loan for that much and I don’t count as I wasn’t actually a trailing spouse. Trailing yes, spouse no. The day before I left for Nashville to help with all of the closing things I got 2 job interviews for the same day as closing. By about 6:30  that night as we were driving in the rain to dinner (my first time to eat at Red Robin) I got a phone call with a job offer. HOLLY MOLLY WE ARE MOVING.

When I got here I made it a real goal to be happy. I want to at least like my job. I wanted a chance to be seen in a different light. I didn’t want anyone to think I was angry. OH don’t get me wrong I struggle to this day, there are days I want to tell someone to STFU and basically how stupid they are being. But I don’t… I wait. This goal almost made my move to the DEV team terrible, they thought I wasn’t technical enough. I never brag about doing this or that, what I know, who I know or anything I just let them go. But not only have I proven myself I am respected by some of the more important people, like the DBAs and our offshore team. I try to really thank people for their help and their efforts. I think mostly I have been successful!

I just try to appreciate that I have so much opportunity and I try to be thankful for where I am and the wonderful things around me. TN was my second chance at happily ever after. I have a wonderful husband who’s still learning how non-introverts function, 3 dogs (and I only asked for 1), a beautiful home, a garden that I grow my own food in and I am lucky enough to have been able to take my dad in and help him get back on his feet.