If anyone had ever told me that I’d end up being a computer analyst (well, kinda) for a living, I would have laughed them out of town!!! And yet, here I am. I’m in my 4th year, and still don’t feel like I have a total grasp of what I’m doing most of the time. I do not consider myself a computer person, and there’s a ton of the jargon I still don’t get. But somehow I muddle through. It helps that I have the best boss on the face of the earth. His patience and sense of humor have made me able to get past all those times I wanted to take a sledge hammer to the damn laptop!! He gets that I’m not a computer person and frequently reminds me of all I’ve learned over these past few years.
Twenty years ago next week, I started nursing school. Wow, that is so hard to believe…in many ways it seems like yesterday. I had been doing a job I hated for so long–10 years–that I found it hard to fathom that I had left it and was looking into a brand new future. I know some people will find this hard to believe, but I really enjoyed nursing school. Oh, there were parts of it I didn’t like (*cough* OB *cough*), but by and large, I liked being a student again. Most of my instructors were great, and the two years flew by. Post-nursing school, I started out working in adult ICU. Not really a fun job, but I learned a ton. Two years later, I transferred to the Pediatric Emergency Department, and I had found my niche. I did that job for twelve years, with two travel nursing stints thrown in. My last couple of years in the PED were spent away from bedside nursing…I was doing Quality Assurance/Performance Improvement. An okay job with better hours, and I wasn’t on my feet for 12 hours 7 days in a row. Just too damn old to do that anymore. And then the computer job fell in my lap. My hospital, like so many others, got a system for an electronic health record, better known as computer charting. I was on the fringes at first, just reviewing workflows and recommending things that the PED needed. Then, someone else’s misfortune became my blessing. My now boss called me and told me that one of the ED application analysts was “no longer working here”, and I was the first person he thought of to fill the position. “Me?!?!?!?”, I almost yelled into the phone. Me, indeed. A few weeks later I was in my first training class up in the Midwest wondering just what the hell I had gotten myself into. But there was some part of me that kept thinking, at my age, and at this point in my career, for something like this to just come along…I’d be a fool not to give it a try. For someone who used to fear change, I seem to have embraced it in my old age. My motto has become “I’d rather fail than regret never trying”.
I think it’s serving me well…
ceegee1958 