Yesterday Went Well

Yesterday I had a meeting with Dr. Krembs and the potential client. It was way out in Kingston so that was a bit of a drive but it wasn't a bad one. The scenery was pretty nice and there wasn't much traffic. The whole thing felt pretty odd for me, because I was sitting down to talk about the code and the project requirements and all that but at the end after everything was agreed I had the option of saying, "No thanks," and walking away from the whole thing. It's something I've never experienced before; in school and internships and the like when you talk requirements it's already been decided that you are going to do the work. The other thing that felt weird was that I could take the contract for the stuff he needs ASAP and when I was done with that I would be under no obligation to help him with anything else. I really like the idea, but it's taking some getting used to.

In the end I had some reservations but decided to take the job, mainly because we were able to pin the requirements down well enough and I'm comfortable with them, and because this is the first work Dr. Krembs has brought me so I really didn't want to turn it down unless it seemed awful. Besides, I just bought a new laptop, and while price had not been set yet I knew it would go at least a good way to paying that off.

I wasn't present for price-setting, for which I was very thankful. It's not something I'm really good at; I'm always worried that I'm going to overshoot and embarrass myself so I undershoot. This is obviously not the path to financial independence, but this is why Dr. Krembs handles those details. I estimated 40 work hours for the things he needed, and as I was driving home she called and said I'd get $1000 for the job. If it actually works out to 40 hours, that's 25 an hour. That's less than I made an hour at IBM this summer, but more than twice what I make at Marist now and more than three times what I made at Marist last year, so obviously quite happy with that. And of course if I can get it done faster than it's even better.

The other piece of good yesterday was that I got an email from Lenovo and my laptop shipped yesterday. Unfortunately it appears to be shipping from Hong Kong, which means it has to clear customs, but maybe I'll get lucky and it will move fast, although I guess it will probably come to the country on the west coast. But at any rate it's way better than shipping on December 7th like they said it would.