End of An Adventure

Tomorrow will be the last day of our Church Service mission. Time seems to have passed both slowly and quickly. It has definitely not been what I have expected. But both Mary Ellen and I feel a lot of appreciation from those we have worked with over the past 12 months. We have both learned a whole lot while being able to contribute our talents toward serving in the Church. While I have worked with Windows and Unix, I have never done anything with Macs, and this whole year has been spent working on Macs, first just setting up new machines, but the last several months I have been writing various scripts to help the Curriculum Department through a number of transitions. My supervisor, the Controller of the department, said that we couldn't have come at a better time as the department was facing a number of technical transitions that were greatly taxing an overworked IT group. Mary Ellen has learned a lot about using the computer and, although she denies it, she does much better on the computer now than she did a year ago. She will be missed, maybe not for her computer skills, but because of her positive and happy attitude, a willingness to do anything, her artistic capabilities, and most especially her ability to make people feel good.

I will definitely miss the people, walking by the Salt Lake Temple every day, the challenges of problem solving, writing programs, designing systems, seeing new brides in the beautifully landscaped grounds, and cheap lunches in the cafeteria. I won't miss the 62 mile round trip through rush hour both ways four times a week, the politics, or the constant soliciting by the homeless around temple square.

Mary Ellen pointed out how much of what I had learned at Penn State had been in preparation for my work in the Curriculum Department. It seemed that whenever they had a problem they couldn't figure out how to solve that I had already faced and solved that problem before. Even today in my last meeting they started talking about Integrated Library Systems and what I might know about them. Fortunately, I just had to give them a quick response and leave all the work to them. A lot of what I did seemed like reruns.