It's all OFFICIAL now!

Dragon Mood? -- eating licorice and still waking up

Yup, it's still sinking in but I'm all OFFICIAL now: a honest-to-goodness, bona fide employee of The Company. (big sigh) WOW!

Mondays and Fridays tend to be the busiest days of the week for me at work. Yesterday was no exception. Work was flying in faster than I could process it or send it back out. And ... Murphy's Law was making an unwelcome appearance in my work universe; anything that could go wrong, did. Suffice to say that by 3:30 p.m., my scheduled time to head home, I was still up to my ears in alligators, beating back the chaos. At 3:45, my phone rings. It's an HR person asking if we can meet in 15 minutes for me to SIGN THE PAPERS? Are you kidding? YOU BET! So-o-ooo, I guess there was a good reason that my workday was chaotic and I was delayed leaving. I filled out forms, printed and signed my name several times over, including the all-important W-4 form. Uncle Sam must have his share.

And, while I haven't blogged about this, another aspect of this, subtle-yet-pretty-darn-important transition is that I AM NO LONGER A CONTRACT WORKER. I am a salaried employee. What does that mean? Well, a very concrete example is that I was ill with the flu on Monday and Tuesday of this week. That would be my second and third day on the payroll with The Company. As a salaried employee, I GOT PAID while at home, laying in my bed with that sledgehammer headache and my roiling, nauseated stomach. Imagine that! In my work universe, that's an UNKNOWN thing! You work, you get paid. You don't work, you don't get paid. That's what I've known for the past eighteen years. Forgive me, dear diary, if this ol' brain still hasn't quite got its figurative arms wrapped around that NEW CONCEPT!

And my apologies for all the CAPS in this post, but this feels BIG, ya know? I've got to express all these feelings somehow!