I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven’t had much time away from work in about a year that wasn’t set aside for a specific purpose. The holidays last winter, visiting a friend/interviewing for a job that I didn’t get, going to Spain, my friends’ wedding, my move, and then labor day weekend (which wound up being preparations for my grandmother’s passing)… All the time I’ve taken away from work has been specifically for an event of some kind or to deal with some kind of major life stress. I haven’t had a proper do-nothing, restful vacation since Thanksgiving of 2022 and that barely counts since I was preparing myself for family therapy with my sister and parents. The last time I took a vacation and didn’t have something horrible, stressful, or upsetting happen immediately afterwards was when I went to a cabin with my friends and siblings for most of a week in the summer of 2022. Which only counts because the stressful thing that happened after that was something I’d mostly gotten used to dealing with (my eye problems flaring up). I really need a proper rest and I really hope I can get one this Thanksgiving. Next week, as you’re reading this.

Between this lack of adequate rest and my current fifty-hours-per-week work schedule, I can feel myself slowly approaching the point of a breakdown. Which is funny since last summer I was only doing forty-five to forty-seven and a half hours per week and I didn’t make it through more than the start of October before I needed to take some time off to rest. Now, because I lost work time (and thus income) around when my grandmother passed away, I don’t really have much of a choice. I can’t really afford to take time off as I try to wrangle my finances back into some kind of decent shape after the expenses of this unfortunately costly year. Throw in the recent few days of pell-mell work in pursuit of a problem at work and I really don’t feel like I can pace myself like I usually do, let alone take any time to rest or work on my “fun” work project. What makes this even worse is knowing that while I was absolutely correct that the fix I was testing before all this started might not be doing anything, I was incorrect in thinking that this was something I could reproduce and my engineers could fix. At this point, as I work and dig into past problems, it is starting to seem like the reported issues from the field were blown way out of proportion, that their volume was entirely lied about (calling it anything other than a lie is so vast of an undertatement that even I am not comfortable making it), and that it isn’t even a recent problem that needs attention.

This last bit is what I discovered the day I’m writing this. I’ve taken a small break at work, to give my mind time to rest and to focus on something ele for the time being, while I emotionally process that the five years of bitter recrimination my team has faced might have been based on nothing at all. That all the talk, the accusations, and the arguments might have been based on nothing but the clouded perception of a group of people who don’t have the perspective to see the forest when they look at a collection of trees. It is truly infuriating and I spent the last three hours since I made this discovery sitting silently at my workbench as I futilely tried to prove that the issue I was trying to recreate could be induced in any system other than one that has been set up so attrociously that it was a marvel that we only had the one issue. If I could cause the problem to occur, then it would mean these years of labor, divisive accusations, and constant bickering had some basis in reality. It would mean I don’t have to go to my boss and tell him that the thing we’ve been harranged about for years only ever happened (AT MOST, since a couple of the reports this number is based on are dubious) four times rather than coming up constantly like we’d been lead to believe. It would mean I haven’t spent so much time and what precious energy I’ve got right now chasing a useless phantom.

But we do not live in that a world where I get to decide outcomes. We live in a world where I have to not only focus myself on all the silver linings this process produced in order to fend off the exhausted frustration I feel, but constantly remind my coworkers that we haven’t wasted our time so much as figured out a whole bunch of lower priority problems that have been bothering us all for a long time rather than the one specific, high-priority problem that we set out to resolve, so that they don’t all turn bitterly recriminating as I try to dot my i’s, cross my t’s, and make sure I’ve covered every possible outcome. After all, it would be even worse to eventually discover that I’d stopped just short of testing the one thing we needed to try to reproduce the issue, prove out my initial theory, or prove the viability of the fix I’ve been testing all this time. Plus, the worst result of all this extra work is a bunch of useful data we can apply to any future instances of this problem in the field. And it’s not like any of the “small” problems we solved aren’t still incredibly useful. Hell, one of them has been something I’ve wanted to work on for two years now but just haven’t had the time. Sure, there’s more work to do on that one to really finish it off, but I was able to make progress I wasn’t sure I’d ever have the time to work towards. The silver linings are pretty dang sterling, if you ask me. It’s just frustrating knowing that the people who were supposed to be giving us information about the problem we were trying to fix were actually holding out on us this entire time. Especially given how much smack they’ve talked all this time.

I’m just circling at this point so I’m going to go do my grocery shopping, go home, take a shower, eat some kind of food, and then try to get to bed at a reasonable hour so that I can at least guarrantee that tomorrow will be a better day since I won’t be working off of just two hours of sleep. There’s really not anywhere to go but up from there.