So a lot has happened right out of the gate into 2010. First of all I cannot even believe we are in 2010. Where did this past decade go? I’ll reflect on that in another post…
Last Thursday my boss at America’s Family Networks called me into his office. This wasn’t out of the ordinary as we would use that time to discuss new projects and how the other projects I was working on were going. But a few moments into the conversation I knew what was coming. You see we were not very busy at all. Of course there were always things to look at when we did not have production for clients to update, new splash pages to build, email newsletters to send out, banners to build, etc…but, as he explained, we were doing a tenth of what we were doing 2 years ago. He said it wasn’t anything that I did and that I had done a great job with everything there. I helped the sales people out immensely, greatly improved our Email Newsletters and helped Kevin, my colleague, out a LOT. I remember one of the first things that Kevin told me when I started there. I’m sure he was used to doing everything related to changing things directly on the server and since I had a ton of experience with command line operations from my time with Premier Hosting, he said to me “You’re going to be really handy having around here!” So that always made me feel good. He no longer had to do everything when a PHP script had to be changed, MySQL statements had to be run, or basic changes to this or that via the command prompt.
I did learn a lot about print, although we didn’t do a ton of it, as well as email marketing too. I had some experience with print and email marketing but as time went along there I improved everything about both processes. I did not get as much play (or even say) in a lot of the design aspects as I would have liked, but it was not a waste of time for the most part. But with that said I was not really all that sad about being let go either. Many know that I was not happy with how some things went down there and certain people’s attitudes towards me either. But I guess that is bound to happen from time to time.
Now I get to focus on my freelance work, collect unemployment, work on music (yay!!) and overall just figure out what it is that I would like to do! I have been told that with my skill set that I would prosper in the freelancing environment and now I can see for myself if that’s a good venture to take on or not. If it is not working out then there are always a plethra of opportunities for me out there. I have already begun working with a few small projects to get my feet wet. One does sound aspiring so far, so we will see how that goes.
Overall I am happy that things came to an end with my last job. There were times that I really liked what I did, but the majority of the time the work was uninspiring and down right monotunous. I did not feel like my skills were being used and that is a tough thing to put up with sometimes. But I am grateful for that job in a lot of ways too. It helped get me out of the whole that was created with the whole GoUrban.net thing sinking and got me doing some different things too. Kevin was great to work with too.
But now with this new year embarking I am excited to see what God has in store for me. I am now forced into checking out full-time freelancing and am excited to see what projects that environment brings. It should be a fun ride and so far I am enjoying every moment of it…
