As of this morning, I've been officially employed here at Good Samaritan Hospital for five years. I say "officially", because that's the day I was hired onto the payroll here... I had been working here since January of '99 as a temporary worker before being made full-time. That situation was similar to the "three hour tour" from "Gilligan's Island" - my initial assignment here was to help clean up the file room, and would last for two days. Two days became a week, which became two weeks, which became a month, and then I mentioned that I knew how to use Excel and I've been stuck here ever since. :)

I'll admit, this place has its problems, and we always seem to find new and unusual ones to deal with. I get stressed over the work here, because it never seems to stop - just when I think I'm caught up on something, ten more somethings show up, all of which need to be done yesterday. It's difficult to get into your work when for every step forward you take, you take two back, one sideways, and one more back for good measure. But I think I've carved out a nice niche for myself here (someone started the horrible rumor that "I'm the only guy in HR who knows what's going on", which I think contributes to my workload), and the five-year mark means that my vacation time accruals increase as of my next paycheck. It's not all bad.

Ah, well. Back to the grind.