I don't have time to be sick!

Yesterday started out a bit rough, and I realized by the time I was meeting with our regional VP to talk about how to get promoted (more on this in a moment) it wasn't just a lack of coffee and some sore muscles.  That sleepy, chilly, achey and stupid feeling was definitely a fever settling in.  Oh arg.  The weird thing about working a 4 hour shift is it hardly makes it seem worth calling off.  Esp after I'd just had this meeting and my shift was half over.

Yeah, so this meeting.  The guy who hired me is the regional VP of something... he is my manager's boss's boss.  He's a nice guy, and he is totally tickled to have brought a Ph.D. into the organization, and he is also pretty sympathetic that I didn't pursue that to be a teller.  (He is kind of in denial that I am 100% married to a career in banking.)  So we were talking about whether I should apply for the Fast Track program to take some classes to be a relationship manager, basically get some experience with sales and some of the back end stuff so that if/when a position opens up at a manager level, I could move into it.  He is pretty confident this can work for me, even though I haven't finished with my on-boarding (ie. I am not a very good teller yet).  I tried to get a feel for whether this would be useful for me if I didn't want to be in a sales position, and I got a sort of "product knowledge is useful" type of answer.  I read that as 'not a waste of time,' and I'd rather get paid to be trained then to actually do my job, if they are cool with it.  We'll see where that goes.  I'm really going to feel bad if I get a job offer to go be a scientist somewhere though.

A little more on that conflict: I'd really like to be a scientist, but I can't deny that it is out of my control.  It seems to be easy to be a banker, and at this stage, I could use some "easy" to give me confidence for the other things I've got going on.  But I can't figure out how I am going to love banking, which is why the search for a scientist job continues.  Today I found a job in Operations for a person who is called a "Scientist" but actually facilitates the development and manufacturing process.  Cool, right?

In other news, I spent today on the couch, snoozing, listening to Pandora and working on some editing contracts.  I've got 2 due Friday, one Monday.  One is for 320 yuan, and I finished that up this afternoon.  The other two are more long term (legit?) projects that have been ongoing.  But I'm impressed that just a couple hours of contract work makes my week suddenly feel slammed (I'm sick, remember).