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.

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