Last year I started feeling quite unhappy at work. The source of the dissatisfaction was a mixture of things: because we’ve been bought by another company, making our client base a little nervous, and because the market is bad, we haven’t sold much lately. And since my job consists mostly in training new clients, I haven’t been doing a whole lot of that.

December marked a year of putzing around, trying to help sales by doing demos, trying to help development by making recommendations to improve the products, writing new exercises for my training manuals that meanwhile sat gathering dust. But mostly, gaining weight and inertia in a cubicle. Thinking I could be doing so many other things. Like starting a gym franchise. Or becoming an vending machine refiller. Anything.

In the fall I had been told confidentially by someone in authority to stay put, that major changes (presumably in management) were coming. So I stayed on. I refused to let my characteristic impatience be my downfall. Every time I wanted to call in sick (something I’ve never done in my whole career), just to avoid going in, I told myself I wasn’t that kind of person.

I didn’t blog about any of it because I was tired of hearing my bitching in my own head. I didn’t want anyone else to grow tired of it too.

This Monday I returned to work, resolved on bitching no more, but doing something about it instead. By 9:30 am my job had started sucking again. In the afternoon my source told me the “changes” would probably not happen.

Tuesday I e-mailed HR and asked for a meeting to discuss a transfer. This is a huge company with thousands and thousands of people, and there are exciting things happening elsewhere.

Wednesday the job kept sucking, and I was saddened that HR didn’t get back to me. But having made the overt move of requesting a transfer, I felt divorced from the whole thing and my mood was much lighter. Whenever one of the things that have annoyed me happened, I would just shake my head and laugh.

Thursday, it seems everything I’d been hoping for in 2003 happened. In the morning, my boss kicked off an exciting new project and put me in charge of it. In the afternoon, a VP came to see me out of the blue to discuss the possibility of recruiting me to his team. At 5:01, there was an emergency with one of our clients in D.C., and I was the only one left who could solve it. So I got to save the day.

And then on Friday, HR contacted me to discuss my transfer out of here.

But it’s all good.