Well, we’re back in the shit again at work. Thankfully, that’s a collective “we” that actually has little to do with me and my current day-to-day, though there remains the chance that it will expand to include me as well [which has happened in the week since I wrote this, though mostly in a “you’re on your own for a bit, so don’t let any plates stop spinning” kind of way]. The crisis, such that it is, is technically another department’s crisis that has become ours as a result of what seems to be–from my moderately informed viewpoint–incredible mismanagement. I’ve been gone for two weeks and am swamped just trying to pick up from where I left off, so this new crisis that has overflowed into my department is not making it easy to figure out what the hell was going on with my project during the week anyone had attention to give it, all of which is made more difficult because the one tester who was covering this aspect of the project for me took a week off as well. By the time he gets back to work, I’ll have muddled through an entire work week without his information and whatever he knew before he left will likely be irrelevant thanks to the continued progress of this project [which is exactly how this has played out]. My only saving grace right now is that I know the project and my related testing equipment well enough that I don’t need to understand what has been going on to test the solutions for it. It’s not great, of course, but it’s all I’ve got right now and everyone else has been too busy to take the time I need to fill me in.

It’s weird to know the team is essentially running in crisis mode and to yet be entirely removed from it. After all, thanks to my calm head, ability to break down huge problems into manageable chunks, and information retention abilities, I’m usually the one who winds up assigned to whatever disasters strike while everyone’s busy. Since I was out of the office, though, it got assigned to someone else and my original project is important enough that no one is going to pull me off it to take over whatever this new disaster is (I’ve officially started avoided learning more about it, as of starting to write this paragraph during a lunch break, so I can make sure I don’t feel compelled to take it upon myself to fix it). They’ll ask me to help them (and have already, multiple times, which is how I know anything at all about this latest crisis) and I’ll be expected to pitch in, but very much only in a “please go do this specific thing for me and then leave me alone while I work until I summon you again” kind of way. I don’t much care to be at someone else’s beck-and-call since I’m not the best at interrupting my own trains of thought without some preparation, but it’s so much better than being given another crisis to deal with.

I wish none of us has to deal with this abject bullshit, but apparently we’re the only group with the flexibility to make this right (assuming anything can be made right, in regards to this disaster of terrible planning) so people who absolutely shouldn’t be moving off my project onto something else are being pulled off my project and assigned to something else. For very good reasons, I’m told by everyone who brings it up, but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone’s essentially swapping horses mid-race and I just hope no one gets hurt as a result of a botched change between projects. That said, it might be nice to see some of my salaried coworkers actually pushed to work longer hours for once. I mean, the general idea of a salaried job in the US is that sometimes you work less than forty hours and sometimes you work more and while I think no one should need to work more than forty hours in a week (in fact, I think a thirty hour week is much more reasonable), I also know that this sort of research and development work sometimes requires a decent amount of crunch time. It would just be nice to not be the only one still here when the lights automatically switch off every night. Which feels mean to say, but I live alone and really enjoy having people around even when I’m not interacting with them, so it’s an understandable thought if nothing else.

Anyway, I’m currently not involved in that mess and have plenty work of my own to keep myself occupied for the time being. I might have to meet with my boss, to make sure my understanding of the team’s priorities is correct and that I’m working on the stuff I should be working on, but I’ve got enough work right now just catching up with what happened while I was gone (a minor crisis that was apparently resolved by a bit of software given to me shortly after I started work on Monday) so it will probably be a few more days before I break the surface of this flood of work and have to pick a direction to swim in. Who knows? I might even make it until next week, when I’m scheduled to have a meeting with him anyway. Anything’s possible right now, including the growing possibility that I’ll actually make it through a week of work following a vacation without some kind of work crisis cropping up to return all the stress I’ve managed to let go of. That would make it the first such week since I started this job, seven and a half years ago, and the thought of that record being broken fills me with the hope I need to wade through the growing mountains of weariness and information overload that separate me from my upcoming weekend. It sure would be great to break that record, even if I have to keep a “work crisis” asterisk on it. I’ll take what I can get, you know? [And break it I did!]