Change Never Comes Easily

So, June has been a strange month so far. First of all, I'm weirded out by the fact that it is even June in the first place. And almost halfway through it at that! Time certainly does fly. Makes me wonder where the time goes. Then I look around and realize that I am, once again, at my desk on Sunday morning, wishing fiercely that the office douche wasn't here so that I could be working with the lights off, and I no longer have to wonder.

Anyway. It's recently been prevalent in my mind that I have been employed at this company for nearly five years, and in that five years I have only changed departments and roles once--and that was just over three years ago. It occurred to me sometime recently that those facts probably don't look terribly good on my resume. Of course, my current role is pretty freaking sweet (I mean, let's face it--what other job allows me to blog as much as this one does?), but it's time for me to expand my horizons again.

So here's my dilemma: I never intended this to be a long term gig. Finance is last on my list of things to be passionate about. And what is the point of doing something one is not passionate about? Money...duh. My job is paying for my college education, and seeing as I hate being in debt, I guess I'll stick around. Plus, you know, without this job I wouldn't have been able to buy my home or my car, so I'm not really complaining about the lack of intellectual stimulation associated with it.

School goes by extremely slowly when you only take one or two classes a semester. I've been graduated from high school (Go Grizzlies!) for seven years now and I'm not done with my associates degree. That's embarrassing, to say the very least, but I'm kind of over it because no one can say that I've been completely slacking. I am a financially independent single female homeowner with zero debt, after all. And I'm not quite 25 years old. But it would be a big, fat lie for me to say that I didn't wish I had the time and energy to devote myself to getting school done so that it could be over before I'm 30.

In the mean time, I suppose, it wouldn't hurt to expand my resume within the company. Experience is experience, right? Right. So I chatted with my manager the other day about the path that needs to be taken in order for me to get into management. It's a long, convoluted path, to be sure, and it has no guarantee of paying off, but it's more or less the only direction I want to go. Well, that's not 100% true. I have always wanted to get into our Training department, but that hasn't worked out so far obviously.

To be honest I'm not particularly keen on playing the corporate game that goes along with the management path. It's the politics of it all that has kept me entrenched on the front lines for so long. Politics both in the sense that I'd have to act a certain way in order to move anywhere, and politics in that I have to deal with things like tenure even though I work in what's supposed to be a "meritocracy." So typical of the corporate world, no? That's basically why I never wanted this to be a long term gig.

I figure the transition from here to there should be about a year, maybe year and a half. I hope that's what it takes, anyway. Who knows what the timeline will really be. All I can do at this point is play the game, I guess, and get my slacker ass back in gear with school (I took yet another semester off to focus on other things, most of which ended up being men...) so that I can get onto doing what it is I want to do.

Now, if I could figure out just exactly what that is, we'll be good to go.