This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re around–taking advantage of being in the same office to get some early feedback on the next version of the software and some early drafts of future features–I was able to figure out a way to get one of my big projects into a state where I could test it and that’s a high enough priority that I’m basically supposed to drop everything to test it the instant the project is testable. Plus, a testing report I wrote weeks and weeks ago wasn’t getting reviewed so my boss announced it was due at the end of this week to light a fire under the asses of the people who were supposed to be reviewing it, so now I have to also get that done this week, including incorporating feedback from my coworkers as soon as possible so that if I need more answers from them, I can actually get them in a timely fashion. Sure, my boss’ declaration worked and I’ve gotten more eyes on my report since he pulled this stunt than I’ve gotten on all of the previous versions of the report combined, but it’s a lot of extra pressure when I’m already swamped. What turns this from something I’d endure into something I’m writing about on my blog is how the team reacted to my decision to stay and keep working when the rest of the team went out to dinner.

It was, quite simply, a lot of peer pressure dressed up as caring and generally supportive suggestions. I was told to let the work lie since it will still be there when I get into the office the next day, that it was okay to not do work since this dinner was a work event, to take it easy and join everyone for some fun, that I shouldn’t worry about catching COVID over dinner so it’d be fine to take my mask off, and so on. Everyone was doing their best to be warm and inviting, thinking I was being my somewhat reclusive self, that I was working harder than I needed to, or that I was nervous about being in a large group without my mask on (I am the only person on my team and one of two in my building who still wears a mask), but it was peer pressure all the same.

Mind you, not a single person asked me why I was making this decision, each of them projecting their own assumptions onto me as they tried to convince me to do something, and it grew irksome after the second attempt to cajole me into attending. Reader, it happened a dozen times. Every single person going to the dinner and three people not going to the dinner tried to convince me to go, even after hearing people fail to do it and my explanation that I had work to do. The only person who didn’t try to convince me to go was my boss since he knows what my workload is and set my work priorities himself. I mean, he did start to try to convince me to go, but realized he was asking me if I “wanted” to go, said that I probably wanted to go, and then dropped it before finishing the question since I’d already told him that I had too much stuff to do.

It was vexatious, odious, and incredibly frustrating to have people project their thoughts onto me instead of simply asking why I had I’d made the decision to refrain from going. It was also additionally frustrating that everyone heard me say I couldn’t go because I had work to do during the meeting where we scheduled the dinner and then STILL tried to convince me to go. I get it, you want to encourage the quiet person to socialize. You want to see your work-only coworker outside of work for once. But everyone else who went to dinner is in a position where, if their work doesn’t get done, deadlines get moved out. If my work doesn’t get done, I have to work longer the next day or come in on the weekend. Deadlines don’t get moved for testers and I’m up against three of them right now (deadlines, not testers) so I have already stepped up from my already hefty ten-hour days to some eleven or twelve hour days. That’s the only way I’m going to get everything done this week, so I absolutely don’t have the time to be knocking off at five in the afternoon to go spend two or three hours with a collection of people who spent the day ignoring my polite but firm refusals to join them.

It was just so frustrating. It’s not like I didn’t want to go. If my week hadn’t suddenly become incredibly busy thanks to the events of Tuesday and Wednesday, I would have gone in a heartbeat. No hesitation. But I’m trying to be a responsible worker and to avoid putting more pressure on myself than I can handle when I start running into final deadlines when projects need to be done or else. I would have had to let something slide if I’d gone and the person whose job it is to set my priorities and direct my labor at work even agreed that I was making the right call if that was what I felt I needed to do to get my work done. Now, I’d love to have a job where I could just knock off after eight hours every day. I’d love to have a job that didn’t require so much overtime to keep up with our understaffed team (we’ve been down a tester for three years now and are just barely scraping by), but that’s not the world I live in. It might not be the world I live in for a while, at this rate, given how rough the job market is for tech and software workers these days… Half the reason I’m not even looking for something else anymore is because of the job security I have here. I’m incredibly confident that I’ll never be fired unless I attack someone, so that security is difficult to argue with in a field currently known for massive, cruel, and unrelenting layoffs.

I’ve about ranted myself out now. The point to take away from this, if you’re not seeing it, is to maybe ask someone why they’re not doing something rather than make up and argue against your own reasons for why you think they aren’t doing something. Who knows, maybe you’d even get to start establishing the emotional work-friend bond you seem to want with them if you’re trying to drag someone soaked in sweat from the heavy labor they’re doing away from said work. People would be much less frustrating to deal with all the time if they’d just listen.