When I worked at Hughes and then Raytheon, one aspect of my job that I really enjoyed was the opportunity I had to work on many different projects. Since I was a systems engineer (read “analysis guru”), I was asked to support a lot of initiatives– whether they were new business ventures in need of flashy graphics, or established projects with some questions about coverage or availability.
I saw others (Laralee included) who were tasked with a single project for a long time– often years. On a few occasions I was asked to work on such projects, and I did whatever I could to avoid them. I would quickly become bored and uninterested doing the same thing day after day.
Now, all these years later, it’s clear that the joy in my job continues to follow the same lines. The fact that I can work on a myriad of projects keeps me interested and excited. Yes, there is the occasional project that’s just plain dull… but more often than not, when I get tired of working on something I can simply switch gears and tackle another project with a different challenge.
Thus, when I enter my hours for the week into the timekeeping system (so I know how much to bill everyone), it’s always interesting to see how many different projects I worked on that week. I just finished this week’s timekeeping, and it looks like I was involved with twenty-one different projects. Wow. Talk about keeping things interesting!