In July, I passed the two year mark at my job.
Two is not typically a big anniversary, but our entire schedule is wrapped around the legislature’s biennial cycle. The legislature meets at the start of every odd numbered year, so the spring of every even numbered year is a mad frantic rush to prepare budgets for all the different agency requested projects.
I was quite fortunate to be hired in summer of an even numbered year. It gave me a full eighteen months of training before being were thrown into the budget preparation process, and this was the final hazing before I could fully call myself a state employee.
As promised, it was utter chaos for the months of April through June, barely keeping my actual projects afloat while estimating 29 projects. Most of these were requests from previous years and won’t be approved. But one doesn’t know which project might suddenly become a high priority for the agency, so even the old numbers needed to be double checked, just in case.
We should have been done by the end of June, but we had one final hurdle this cycle – uploading our estimates into a new database. As to be expected, the new program had a rocky roll out, especially for the project managers in Las Vegas who had a difficulties connecting to the main server in Carson City.
Late at night before my employment anniversary, I slid into my desk to input my last four projects, joining my two fellow Vegas architects on Microsoft Teams. It was a throwback to the old studio days, architects working late at night, shooting the shit.
In the midst of it all, the boy wandered out of the bedroom.
So I spent the last moments of my second year with the SPWD doing loops in the backyard, chasing the sandman.