Thanks guys.
I agree, there's an 'offer you shouldn't refuse' aspect, and there is serious opportunity for the change to make me more valuable to any company not just this one.
When a VP takes me aside and asks me to close his office door, we need to talk, it's probably important to him. And there's a world outside my company's door.
The thing is I know the person vacating this position and I know the major reasons why and it gives me pause.
I also legitimately feel the people that I deal with benefit from my help in the practical sense. I help them get life saving equipment back up and running and in my gut it feels important. My opinion is that the reason I can do so well at this is because I'm me. I honestly don't see anybody else that's able to step up and do this job correctly. I know management doesn't even really have anyone else doing my job. I've spent years telling EOD guys "your problem is my problem" and meaning it, so I know they will still call me and frankly that's already a job that's too big to handle. regardless, management never has appreciated what actually goes into my role. Some of them feel I 'answer the phones'. The truth is I'm assigned work for internal and external sources at a moment's notice. Example: I saw an error on a drawing. I had myself created the missing element a year ago. Now I'm spearheading an engineering chnage to get it corrected. At the same time I'm coordinating a hazmat sensor repair for a customer in Korea. At the same time I'm handling an unhappy customer in Colorado with kid gloves. At the same time I'm documenting how to ship a type of dangerous good, and develop a checklist system to ship other types. Also at the same time I'm assisting a production tech on how to get an obsolete and bastardized robot running so we can test some spare parts for a customer. To top it off, I'm expected to get my security clearance for our USN customer. That's one day. And then sales calls and tells me "we're selling all these parts can you review?" and I have to pull every drawing an consider how the tech aspect allows (or disallows) them to sell those parts, as they may not work with that specific customer's configuration.
Kinda different from "answering the phones" but to them, that's what I do.
