By the time anyone reads this, I’ll be done working for the year.

It’s kind of fitting that the big thing on my agenda for the last day is the try-to-make-it-quarterly touchpoint meeting with my supervisor to talk through the whole work experience thing and make plans for moving forward into 2024. So, having wrapped up all the final tasks I wrote about briefly earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about that whole topic and how things have been and how they’re going.

Upon reflection, my work life in 2023 wasn’t all that bad, honestly. Sure, there are daily frustrations about meetings that could’ve been emails and bureaucratic busybodies, but I can usually deal with those kind of things by writing songs or blog posts about them and moving on. To tell the truth, though, I’m pretty sure I’m part of the best, most effective team of people I’ve ever worked with, and almost certainly the best boss I’ve ever had the luck of drawing. I’m given room to do the work effectively, my contributions are valued, and I’m provided opportunities to grow and learn myself, and help others do so. Because of all this, our group is in a position to make some real, positive changes in an organization that could definitely use some.

The campsite rule applies all over the place; leave things better than you found them. I think we’re going to do that here.

Out of a bunch of good things I can say about work, my biggest accomplishment in 2023 has been finally being able to hand off the project I’ve been the unofficial caretaker of since the big re-organization a couple of years back. Not that I didn’t enjoy running that particular effort for most of the last decade, and it was a definite boon in terms of learning how to manage programs, but as I’ve moved on to other things, it’s been this weird anchor of “other duties as assigned” that I hadn’t been able to give adequate time to, even if we did accomplish some pretty cool things laying the groundwork for (the latest attempt at) modernization of a computer system that regularly gets written up in “World’s Oldest Computer Program” articles. Keeping the data flowing there’s been a good experience, but it was time to let it go. The new guy handling things is honestly doing a better job than I ever did, and I’ve long been ready to fully move on to solving the next problem.

So as frustrating and change-filled as this year has been, my work life has been, weirdly, one of the anchors that’s kept me from floating too far afield and kept me grounded. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make more positive changes and impose a little more order in some chaotic corners of the public sector in the coming year, even if my boss does keep making friendly hints about making me a boss myself one day. I don’t think I’m quite on board with that yet, but she’s nothing if not persisent and persuasive.

We shall see.