Yesterday our company announced, internally only so far as I can tell, that they are instituting a wage freeze world-wide. Non-management folks like me have a six-month freeze starting on our usual review date (mine is January); managers and executives like Liz have a one year freeze.

Our company is stable. It is one of the few insurance companies that has had enough strong leadership and savvy to underwrite the most solid of risks and so our share of the recent events will not bring us to our knees. Our chairman decided though that in order to maintain our high standards and prevent layoffs, we'd all need to pitch in and sacrifice.

I don't mind. One has but to glance at the papers to see how many people are losing their jobs these days. Either the economy or directly because of the terrorist activities, companies are folding and scaling back all over. If all I lose is a four percent raise that I haven't gotten yet, I'm thankful. Too many others have taken harder hits than that.

Last night I also had a wonderful experience. Almost a nirvana… I uploaded a script to the game and it compiled and worked on the first go. Rob chuckled at me because I welled up with tears over it. But hey, I have struggled for years…and you know, it might not be the world's most inventive or complex script - but it's mine! He did verbally pat me on the head later. Probably out of guilt that I asked for his help and he claimed he couldn't get into his email to see the script shards I'd sent him. I still have some tweaking on it to do but it works okay the way it is, even if I did glaze over when Rob was trying to explain to me that I might be happier using variables instead of datafields. Baby steps. It's all baby steps.