After just shy of three years in the Survey Operations Division at Statistics Canada, I am moving on to the Environmental Accounts and Statistics Division at STC as part of a program called Corporate Assignments.  Basically, people can move around in the agency to broaden their knowledge and experience through temporary assignments.

My coworkers took me out for lunch on Wednesday and said some very nice things about me and I received phone calls from most of the regional tech support people that I’ve gotten to know quite well over the last three years.  Though I won’t miss the negative stress of the job, I will most certainly miss the people.  Fortunately, I won’t be that far away from them and I may get to deal with some of them in my new job as one of their clients.  And, being a temporary assignment, there’s a good chance I’ll be back in Survey Operations in a year (unless my assignment becomes a deployment).

One of the big side benefits of this will be that I will no longer have any on-call or regular overtime.  Though this means I won’t be accumulating weeks worth of compensatory timeoff each year, it also means I won’t be working the equivalent of 14 or 15 months in a 12-month period.  To put it in perspective, I will have taken about 56 days, or 11 weeks (!), of time off this year, and I still have my annual allotment of vacation time and some unused comp time.