More excellent news

I start work on Thursday :)

I've landed a contract as a Network Engineer for the IT&T company that services the energy companies here in Queensland. The work looks promising, with lots of hands-on Cisco work and exposure to VoIP implementations, and nice small team of 3 engineers reporting to a single project manager. I absolutely aced the first interview, which was over the phone, even managing to drag out an explanation of BECN and FECN in frame relay from the dim depths of my memory in response to a technical question that just came shooting out of left field. I later heard that another candidate, who had a CCIE I might add, simply couldn't answer the BECN/FECN question :)

It's my first time as a contractor, so that should be a learning curve too. As far as I can tell, I'm on a decent hourly rate. I've taken up the services of an umbrella company to manage all my tax and payrolling so that I don't have any headaches with the financial side of things, and can also get my head round all this talk of tax deductible expenses and see what the hell that actually means for us practically :) I can imagine that lunchtime chats with colleagues are going to be about how best to work the tax system, rather than about where the best surf is ;)

Probably the best thing about this job, though, is that it's based right in the centre of town, on the 20th floor of a huge golden monolith of a building on the bank of the river - should be a nice place to go each day. Probably the worst thing about the job is that it's formal dresscode mon-thurs, which will be something for me to adjust to - luckily fridays are jeans and t-shirt, otherwise I'd probably be suffering after a few weeks.

Getting this job means a number of things for us - firstly, we can get on with searching for a house to rent, and secondly it takes the pressure of Skye for finding a job too. With just my income rolling in we can get started on moving in to our own place, and we afford to be a little patient until the right business analyst role arrives.