Those paying attention have probably noticed that for the last month and change, I haven’t been posting much, and when I have posted, I’ve dropped little hints about things happening that I didn’t necessarily want to talk about it.

At this point, I feel it’s safe to talk about those things, at least in general terms.*

For the last almost nine years, I’ve made my living doing software and business process development for a large federal agency. Starting tomorrow, I’ll still be doing that, but on a different project with a different part of the agency for a non-trivial increase in annual salary.

In practice, not a whole lot in terms of my day-to-day life is going to change. The work will be pretty much the same as now; it’s still logistics software (hell, mostly the same software), only being used to buy and store and ship different kinds of things. Also, I’m not moving – this project is kind enough (or deperate enough) to continue to pay to put me up in hotels and feed me along with the usual compensation in order to take advantage of my “expertise” in sorting out business processes and tweaking the software to make it work with those processes. What’s different is that I’ll be working directly for the agency HQ organization, and reporting officially to someone in DC rather than locally (though they’re kind enough to let me keep a desk in the Richmond metro for the time I won’t be travelling).

And yeah, a bit more money. I like that bit of it quite a bit.

Not surprisingly, I’m looking forward to trying something different, and learning new things; I’m not simply kissing up to the new bosses when I say that the areas of business I’ll be dealing with have some terribly exciting things going on, and some interesting process problems to solve. Also pleasant is that I’ll be on a team with some dear old work friends I haven’t had a chance to associate with in several years – it’s a good team, and for the most part, it’s folks who already know how to work with each other, so yay.

…as for why I wasn’t saying much of anything for the last however long: simply, I didn’t want to jinx it. There’s all sorts of strange human resources calculus going on behind the scenes that’s way beyond my ken, leading to some interesting wrinkles and hoops to jump through to put the team together. That, and I didn’t want to say anything until it was officially official; saving the the trouble of backing statements off if things all fell through. That’s it, really. I have been rather excited about the possibility for some time.

In any case, that’s my big news. We now return to our regular practices of not talking about work any more.

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* –For a number of reasons, I don’t make a habit of talking specifics about my work or my job in this forum; I don’t mention specifically where I work, or name names, or anything like that. I believe I’ve scrubbed all the specific mentions from the archives. Yes, I know many of you readers already know. I do this mostly because it’s not really anybody’s business; and as it is, it’s easy enough to connect the dots to create a profile. Also, on the rare occasions where I do drop the occasional non-specific bitchy comment about the office, I don’t want my blowing off of steam to tie itself to the organization, because I like my job and would like to keep it, thank you very much.