The Big Announcement

After seven years with Oklahoma State University, longer than I have ever spent with any other company in my professional career, I have resigned.

Several of you know that I have been job hunting for about two years now. At times, I have been actively looking. At others, I have merely been keeping my options open. Finally, a job has found me.

If you look back a couple of entries, you'll see that I had come to a realization about my position with OSU. I no longer felt like I was part of something worthwhile. It is very important to me to feel like I am part of something worthwhile. That was on Thursday.

Thursday evening, I received a phone call from my friend/mentor/former supervisor, Ron King. He told me that a friend of his had recommended him for a job with a local company but, given the hiring range his friend said they were looking at, he figured that they couldn't afford to pay him enough to get him to leave OSU. He told me he'd get some more information and call me in the morning.

Come Friday, Ron called me back and told me the company was a young company that was looking for an IT guy. They had nobody doing their IT at the time and Ron was right, they couldn't afford him. He had, however, recommended me for the position. Once again, he had my back.

About 2:00 Friday afternoon, I got the contact information (and a little more information) from Ron and called his contact. We talked for a little over 20 minutes and agreed to meet for an interview on Saturday morning. I was ordered not to dress up ant it's the first interview I've ever been to wearing bluejeans. My would-be boss, who is coincidentally also named Joe, and I talked for an hour and a half.

24 hours after my first contact with Joe, I had a job offer... and it was a pretty good job offer. I had a few questions and hoped I might sweeten the deal a little so I sent a response... and got a sweeter deal.

Today, I turned in my resignation and sent official acceptance of the new job. Starting August 15, I will be the Information Technology department for a dental group that takes care of the dental needs for underprivileged children. Now that is something that's worthwhile.

The events of the last 5 or 6 days have been a bit of a blur. This is the first time a job has found me and everything has moved so fast. The whole impact hasn't hit me yet and only just started breaking through today as I handed in my resignation. But I feel good about it. It feels like the right thing to do... scarry as it may be.