Finally, after almost a year and a half of working on this one project, it has been announced and shown to the world. I no longer need to keep the details a secret, I can finally complain about my days with specifics, and I no longer need to keep to myself just how cool and exciting the thing I’ve been working on actually is. As of a week ago (from the day this gets posted, anyway), the product has been shown at the preeminent tradeshow for my particular niche of the tech industry. It was announced the night prior at a special new technology presentation event, but today it is being demonstrated to an entire convention’s worth of poeple, is getting discussed on reddit, has a live website I can finally send people so they can see what I’ve been working on, and so far the response to it seems to be overwhelmingly positive. I’m not at the convention since my employer tries to avoid sending hourly employees on trips (we get paid for travel time and all the time we’d be doing work stuff on the trip, which would be a huge number of hours even compared to my normally extensive workweeks), but I’ve already done a couple hours of tech support for it and, despite the problems my coworkers ran into, the whole thing seems to be running smoothly. Which is, you know, a huge weight off my mind. Throw in that tomorrow is the day my testing documentation is due and I, as of starting to write this, have already sent it off… Well, I’m basically done with the project now. Finally.

Unfortunately for me, there’s a lot of space between “basically done” and “actually done” that will still involve a lot of work on my part. I have to be prepared to answer any questions about the documentation I’ve put together. I also have to continue to compile and archive the testing data that didn’t make it into those reports (because it’s hugely detailed and not really relevant in the same way my testing reports are) on top of reviewing the documentation my team’s technical writer is putting together since I know the most about the product in terms of practical applications. Plus, I’m also a writer so I can provide a level of feedback my coworkers do not. Then, on top of that, we’re already working on additional improvements and changes to the product that we’ll incorporate into a future release or work into the units as they go out the door (typical R&D stuff, to be honest), so I still have plenty of work to do. I just don’t have a huge, looming deadline. Which, you know is pretty sweet. Plus, there’s still a couple process reviews I should go to and then the actual product release meeting, where I might be asked a bunch of prying questions about the work I’ve done by the team the company put together to act as the final check on making sure subpar products aren’t released, so I’m not quite out of the woods yet.

Hopefully that’ll be done in the next couple weeks (or week, as this post goes live) and then I can finally take my one week vacation to just rest, recover, and play my silly little video games before diving back into the grind of preparing for the next release of the product. I’m sure we’re going to have meetings about it soon, but for now it’s just nice to think about being past the finish line and really just doing paperwork so I can collect my medal. I’m so ready to rest. I am struggling to stay focused and active at work, what with all of this burnout piling up and the continued mix of demands on my mental and physical energy as I’ve stopped being able to sort my testing into one bucket or the other and now need to not only seamlessly shift from one bucket to the other but also work heavily in the third bucket that is both mental and physical demands. To set all the metaphors aside, I’m not able to take things easy at work yet, despite all my deadlines being met and my work ostensibly being done, but at least I don’t have that added stress of trying to do it all on a deadline.

I’m still probably never going to write about what the project was on this blog. I don’t want to connect my writing here, or any of my various social media accounts that link to and from this blog, to my job. I don’t think my employer would entirely agree with my views on everything, nor do I think it would be good if they found out how much I complain about my coworkers sometimes. Nor do I want to even point to my physical location with that degree of specificity and naming the product or my employer would give anyone all the information they’d need to find me pretty much any day of the week. So no, no specifics. Not here. Not ever. Which kinda stinks since I am, actually, very proud of the product and the work I’ve done. Instead, I’ll just continue to write vagule about my work in a way that ensures no one can figure out the specifics and complain in excruciating detail to my friends now that I don’t need to avoid spilling the beans any longer. Not that any of my friends are in my particular industry niche, nor do I think that telling them would have gotten me in trouble if I’d done it. It’s just best to stick to the letter and spirit of the law, sometimes, and this was one of those times. Now, though, all is revealed and all I gotta do is not talk about trade, industry, or corporate secrets and that’s plenty easy. I’ve been doing that my whole adult life.