Well, I'm unemployed as of Friday, March 13, 2009.

For the past 6 years (since May 15, 2003), I've been working as a Information Systems Technician for the Central Communications Office of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Well, since I was the only one, I was also carrying out the duties of the Chief Information Officer as well.

OCC (for it's initials in spanish, Oficina Central de Comunicaciones) had several functions, most of which were directly done for the benefit of the Governor. We were responsible for the planning and execution of all public activities of the Governor, we wrote all his public messages, we made sure that any public announcement from any agency in any media followed the plans of the current government platform, and we monitored radio, tv, and the written press for news about the Government and sent reports every hour to almost all the public agencies on the island. Since I was the only one in my office in charge of the computer systems, I also was the one to go out to the Governor's activities and made sure that if he had a presentation, or a laptop, or a Plasma, that it worked as it was supposed to. This gave me a chance to not only get to know him a little bit better, but to travel the island to wherever he needed to be.

It was fun, and most of the photos I will publish in here are from those outings. Many behind-the-scenes and candid shots.

Since I was the only one left when the new administration came into power on January 2nd, I expected them to sit down with me and let me explain to them how the office ran before. I expected them to assign me somebody to train in the ways to maintain the systems running efficiently and, especially, to teach them how the new 1/2 million US dollars monitoring system fully works. Well, I was expecting too much, apparently. Without warning, they fired me last friday. So many things left unfinished, so many details now lost to them.

I am not sorry that I am gone from there. Working in OCC is a dead-end job. After you reach the highest office in the country, what else is there to accomplish? And the highly political atmosphere in that office can sometimes choke even the most diligent politician. AND, I've been working nonstop for the past 2 years, without a possibility to get a vacation any time soon. So, it is somewhat of a relief to get out of there, but I will most definitely miss the work. And, it also was my very first work experience, outside summer jobs, so I will always hold it in my heart.

I did nothing yesterday, and I did nothing today. I have to get used to the fact that I am no longer on-call 24 hours a day, and that no matter what happens, I am no longer responsible for that system. I know it will take some time until I can discover who I am without working there, but I hope it is for the best.

Puerto Rico is not immune to the effects of the global economical crisis. The new Governor has announced he plans to reduce drastically the size of the Government, firing over 40,000 people on June.

I suppose I have time now to be a full-time participant of this community, so I'll be around here every day. At last, I can post new deviations as I always wanted to do from the beginning.

See you around.

Tomas