You should go to Redmond some time. It's pretty nice. And you can come and visit us there, because we're moving. Soon.
My interview was yesterday at one in the afternoon. After some communication with the hiring and managing people for this job, we set up the interview time, and I started studying. I read about SQL. I read about XML. I read about Microsoft, and about Siemens, and about Xbox, and about Redmond. Since it takes about two hours to drive to Redmond, and traffic, sometimes unpredictably, can be horrendous beyond words, we left just after 9 yesterday morning. What we planned on doing was to drive to the office where I was interviewing so we'd know exactly where it is, then call our friend Meghan and hang out until the interview. The directions were good, and we found the office, then caught up with Meghan. She and Kirsten dropped me off at the office and went to hang out. I called Mike, the contact between me and the two people I was interviewing with, and during the ten minutes he took to get down to the lobby, I got over my jitters. I had been pretty quiet and reflective all morning, kind of going over my thoughts in my mind as Kirsten quizzed me on the way over. Mike took me up to the third floor to the Xbox conference room, and there were two pretty friendly guys in there ready to ask me some questions and hear what I had to say. And I left my quiet, pensive self downstairs and gave them all of the energy and passion and enthusiasm they could have wanted. I was so happy with the way the whole interview went. I was able to take my time to think clearly, and they asked some things that I had prepared for. Ultimately, these guys are smart enough to know if I'm not the person for the job, no matter what kind of answers I feed them. If I'm good for a job but not this one, they could figure it out. So in that sense, the pressure is a little smaller. So I told them about how I'm a very curious person* and how much I'd love to work there. I wish I could remember some of the specifics, but I really don't. Not any of the interesting stuff, anyway. About 40 minutes after I started the interview, we were shaking hands and telling each other how much we enjoyed meeting each other, and then Mike took me back downstairs to the front door. We talked a little on the way out, and he told me that he thought I'd done well and that he would let me know by the end of the day. (Wow!) This was a good sign in my mind. First of all, if I'd completely blown it, I'd probably have some idea myself, for one thing, but he'd also run it all by the other guys as well. Secondly, if they had a lot more people to talk to still or hadn't eliminated some of the previous interviewees, it would take longer than three hours as well. So it sounded positive. Well, sure enough, thirty minutes after my interview ended, my phone rang. It was Mike. He asked how I felt like the interview went and then offered me the job. All of the paperwork, salary negotiation, etc. is still getting moved along, but once we get through all of that, it looks like I finally have a job! It's so exciting. They'd like for me to start at the beginning of this coming week, but we have to find a place to live first, and then move there, so it may be more like a week from now. Either way, we're on our way across the water to Redmond!
I've already been asked a couple of times what I'll be doing exactly. I don't know every single detail of the day-to-day job just yet, but I do have the fortunate position of having a job I can actually explain, unlike a lot of the people in Redmond. First of all, it needs to be said that I'm working at the world headquarters of Xbox. If that's not cool, I don't know what is. The people who run all of the operations of Xbox Live and manage all of the data going back and forth are all really brilliant, and they're great at what they do, but the issue that they have to deal with is that all of this great knowledge is sitting inside people's heads. This makes things difficult sometimes, so I will be working with all of these brilliant computer nerd types to get all of the information from their heads into some kind of deliverable format, either on the Web or in print. They need to have troubleshooting steps documented, installation or update processes recorded, etc., so that's what I'll be doing. I'm excited, because it means that I will always have something more to learn, something to do, some area of technology that I get to come up to speed on straight from the mouth of an expert. One of the questions they asked in the interview was why I wanted to leave my job teaching. I told them that I didn't. Technical writing, to me, is teaching. I get to take ideas straight from the source and help to share them with someone else in a form that will help them understand. Ideas are just waiting to fly around, get shared, and make things happen, and I get to facilitate all of that exchange. I can't wait to get started. I imagine I probably can't take a bunch of pictures, but I'll make sure to report on as much as I can to give you an idea of what the place is like.
We have friends in Redmond (Meghan and her husband Ryan), so we joined them at the end of the day for a little celebratory dinner at a place called Trader Vic's. It's a little fancy, but it's one of the many, many places around the area where Ryan gets a discount for working for Microsoft, so we got to enjoy it. I asked our server whether I should get the Phad Thai or the Lamb Curry, and he said they're both good but that the lamb curry is "funner" because there were things I could add to the dish myself. OK. I went for it, and it was the coolest meal EVER!! It was indeed funner. The lamb curry stew was in a plate with a rim, and there was another dish that fit around the edge of it and had several little sections for various toppings/accoutrements, some of which made sense and some of which were a little more unlikely (but still tasty). There were also raisins, which are the worst thing in the world. The WORST. I ignored them and went with the other things. It was fantastic. A little of this here, a few more sunflower seeds there, maybe an additional flake of coconut on that spoonful... Every bite was customized. Fantastic. I didn't get a photo of the meal, so I drew this version once we got home. I've preserved all of the intricate details the best I was able, but it should be noted that both the stew and the chutney looked a good deal less amoeboid than my drawing. Click to zoom. For, you know, detail.
IV
So now we're on the hunt for a place to live in Redmond. It's like hunting for a job, except that you apply to give someone a ton of money instead of applying for them to pay you. There are all kinds of nice places around Redmond, but it can be pretty pricey, so we have to weigh our options before we jump into something. They'd like me to start working on Monday, but it may be a few days after that before we can get settled. Wherever we end up, I'll make sure to give you pictures and a full report. We're really excited, and the way everything has come together, it's really clear to us that God has brought us here and has things for us to do in Redmond. It will be great to see how it all happens. When I have a chance to sit down and put it all down, I have a lot of thoughts about Redmond and the new culture we're jumping into. Some happy, some apprehensive. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading!
* - I gave them my spleen story:
I am addicted to Wikipedia. Not in a spend-tons-of-time-daily sense. Just in the sense that if I don't know a particular fact, I am all over Wikipedia like trucks on highways. So when Kirsten and I were engaged and I wondered aloud one day exactly what a spleen does, Kirsten had to slow me down and have me rein in my curiosity, almost on a dare. I asked her when I could check, and she said, "After we're married." That was about four months away, so I just stuck the question in the to-do stack of my mind and got on with my life. Skip forward a few months. Kirsten and I stumbled into our new home after traveling a full day or so home from Prague, I set my bags down, got a drink of water, took out my computer, and looked up "spleen" on Wikipedia. I imagine I slept better that night than I had for months.
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