My Eighth Anniversary at IBM

Today marks my eighth anniversary working for IBM. Much has happened in those 8 years. I have had 4 managers, been moved once, and had many co-works come and go. I am now one of the senior staff members, and last year was promoted to staff, meaning that others look up to me for my knowledge on the products we support. Of course, that took 7 years.

Some of my accomplishments over those eight years at IBM have been:

• Arriving on time most days
• Creating and teaching classes to other IBMers in other countries
• Developing a website and PC programs that allow our group flexible schedules
• Printing some things
• Tutoring new IBMers and helping them get up to speed
  

I like the people that I work with. To my knowledge, everyone really does care about our customers. We have the highest levels of customer satisfaction at IBM, and our center recently won an award from the SSPA for our sustained levels of high customer satisfaction.

There are some things I would change about the way I do my job. One, I wish I could be more organized and efficient, and was able to take more live calls, and wrap up some of the calls that I try to be too helpful on (sometimes to my own detriment). I wish I had more time to experiment with the programs we use and get good at using them. As I often tell customers -- The difference between you and me is that I don't use the software. I just support it. I think that should change.

I will leave you with this idea. Perhaps this year, I will create the Christmas letter using the iSeries/AS400 system and software.

I could use an ODBC database connection to populate a physical file with members containing the name and addresses of my family and loved ones. I would write a DDS printer file to extract the data from the physical file and create a Christmas Letter spooled file. Then I could import that into Infoprint Designer, arrange the data and specify which fonts to use. If the proper AFP fonts did not exist, I could create my own using TypeTransformer. Then I could upload my Designer project and attach the form definition and page definition , overlays and page segments that it creates and generate a PDF with Infoprint Server and e-mail it to everyone!

Or maybe not. . .