Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.

Which meant that, on monday and tuesday of last week (the week prior to the day I write this and the subsequent day that this got posted), I worked twenty-eight hours in two shifts so I could make sure to hit the numbers I needed Wednesday afternoon so I could keep my plans to go record another FF14 wrestling show AND also have time to fix things when stuff inevitably went wrong. Which it did, twice. Thanks to my planning and scheduling, I still had time to spare when the final test got run, which mean that documentation could also be delivered on time. Or would have been if the meeting hadn’t been cancelled in the half-hour before I did my final test. That was probably the closest I’ve ever come to losing it at this job. I’d just busted my ass while my online community was in shambles in order to make a surprise deadline happen (I mean, I’d literally asked when I got the new gear if there was a deadline for it and was told there was not) and then the meeting got rescheduled merely because someone didn’t want to have a meeting.

This is the second time on this project that I’ve worked proactively and at a good pace for months, had to cram things in during the end because of a shifting deadline, and then gotten told that, actually, the deadline is being changed after I’ve finished my work because a different team in our process didn’t want to work hard to meet the deadline. At least this time it wasn’t a deadline that had been on the books for at least a literal year. I was in a much better place though, last time, to emotionally handle the stress, so this one was easily the worst and I’m going to be upset about it for a while. At least, when my boss brought up my “inconsistency” I could point out to him that I had actually started testing right away, that the recent tests proved we shouldn’t exceed the guidelines I set around one test an hour, that I had, in fact, worked to get the early hours of the day covered since it is unreasonable to expect me to do all the testing myself, and that if anyone had failed to get things done on this project, it certainly wasn’t me. It wasn’t fun to have that conversation again, but I could at least refute every bit of evidence he offered up or suggestion he made. Sucks that I had to do this again, but I learned my lesson from last summer and I’m not going to take this without pushing back this time.

On top of all that, I came back from my exhaustion-mandated 4-day-weekend-of-barely-enough-recovery-time to find that the entire lab is being moved around for now discernable reason other than “efficiency” (that is somehow going to magically manifest as a result of several people who get paid more than I do spending a week reorganizing a lab rather than doing their jobs) since it’s not like having these workbenches shifted around a tiny bit makes any substantive changes to the way we work. Who cares where the trashcan sits? It’s just going to get moved to right next to whatever workbench people are working on. Thankfully, I was able to object to having all of my test gear moved to the other side of the lab, out of range from my computer, where I wouldn’t be able to run passive tests while continuing to do work in my office. And yeah, I’ve got a laptop, but there’s no desk space to put it and I’m too old to be hunching over a too-small laptop in a chair that’s the wrong height while trying to type out my test cases. I just want things to stay calm and normal for a while. I want some slow-paced days where I can get work done at a comfortable pace instead of needing to fly from one thing to another. I really need things to just slow down a little bit.