I’ve been taking it easy for about a month now. Maybe a little more than. After we found out that the final release meeting of my project got delayed until just this past week (as this gets posted), I decided to take my long put-off week of vacation. I unfortunately did it after a full day of work on a Monday, but I still got a decent week away from work by taking the next Monday off. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of pushing myself as hard as I did and my current medication-induced exhaustion, all of which means that I’ve been avoiding overtime in my work weeks. Mostly by taking days off every week, forcing myself to avoid even doing the “here’s how much overtime I could get” calculous because I can’t get overtime until I’ve got 40 non-PTO hours allocated to a week and I’m not going to work eight “extra” hours without getting my overtime pay. It’d be better to just not use the vacation time in the first place. Anyway, I’ve taken at least one day off each week, mostly dictated by my messed up sleep schedule, overwhelming exhaustion, or my poor physical health. I expected, initially, that I was only going to take it easy for the first two weeks, the ones involving my planned week-off of work, but something has come up every single week since then that has left me with one or more days where I could not force myself into the office.

It hasn’t really been a problem, though. Work has been slow for a while, as we’ve been waiting for this project to be officially done, so there’s not a lot piling up. There’s plenty to do and more coming up, but right now I’ve been able to skate by on my reduced weekly hours without things getting difficult for anyone. That might be changing soon, depending on how things are going after the project is fully released and we can work on it again (and with all the other stuff that’s been on hold finally getting dislodged from where it has been stuck for months), but that is fine. I really need to get back to my usual overtime. Financially, I mean. I can get by for a little while on my normal hours, but between my rent, student loans, and various monthly bills, overtime is the only thing keeping me afloat these days. As things inevitably get more expensive as time goes on, tariffs come into play, and the US’s economy slowly falls apart, it will only get more difficult since I highly doubt my employer is going to give me sufficient raises to keep up with inflation. I mean, hell, we haven’t even been notified about our quarterly bonuses and that’s incredibly unusual for this time of the year. The only explanation for that is the company is trying to figure out how screwed we are by the tariffs (which I’m sure will be an ever-evolving amount) and doesn’t actually know how much we need to be stuffing money into our metaphorical mattress in order to weather whatever is going to happen in the next few years.

I’d still love to get a job that paid me enough to get by without needing overtime, but that’s difficult to find in this economy, with my living situation and student loans being what they are. So it’s back to overtime for me. I mean, it’s not like there’s ever going to be a lack of work. We’re a four-tester team that has only had three testers for the last four years and it is really starting to wear us all thin. By which I mean we were all worn pretty damn thin years ago and we’re now starting to wonder how we’re actually going to get things done ever. I mean, most of the time you can sort your work by important, urgent, important and urgent, and nice-to-do, but we haven’t stopped working on important and urgent stuff in years and, sure, I could have been doing that this whole time I’ve been resting, but I pushed myself to the brink of physical and mental collapse already. I NEEDED to rest or else I was going to fall apart. Maybe, when some of the issues I’m dealing with have become less demanding on me (like my medication side effects, physical well-being, or work stuff), I’ll won’t need to spend every day I can manage getting as much rest as possible. That sure would be nice.

In the meantime, though, it’s back to the grindstone. I need the money, there will be work that needs doing, and nothing will change any time soon except probably for the worse, given the state of society in the US nowadays. I genuinely can’t imagine things getting any better any time soon… This isn’t my depression talking. This is me being as realistic as I can be about how things are going in my country. They’re trying to repeal the civil rights act! I’m not surprised they’re doing this because they’ve been blatantly clear about what they were planning ever since their shitty little plan leaked, but it is still infuriating even if I expected it. So no, I do not expect things to get better any time soon and my biggest hope is that they won’t get a lot worse. That’s not a hope I’m putting much stock in, mind you, but it’s the best I’ve got these days. That and maybe I’ll get my student loans paid off at some point. Tax season absolutely kicked the shit out of me, mentally speaking, like it always does, but this was the first time in eleven years that I felt like they might actually get paid off some day. Who knows. Maybe the economy will collapse and all forms of money (and debt!) will be meaningless as we scrape out a meager living in the ruins of our cities while the rich and their lackeys party it up in their little preservations of their power. Or, you know, whatever happens post societal collapse. It’s not like I’ll have much say in the matter.