Work has been hitting me on all fronts lately. It has routinely achieved the burnout trifecta of inducing mental, emotional and physical exhaustion in me on a day-to-day basis for the last month (all of March, really) and it does not look to be letting up any time soon. Hopefully my latest email to my landlord results in me getting the answers I need so I can make a decision there [it did], about whether or not to stay at my current apartment [I’m going to, but I’m mad about it]. It would be nice to be able to put that particular issue to bed so I can focus on literally anything else (having a place to live kinda takes precedence). The next highest priority thing would be to find a new job if I can, since this one is killing me a little bit faster than entropy does, on average, and I’d really like to no longer have such a drain on my existence be such a significant part of my day-to-day. I am so tired after everything happening this week that I’m practically falling asleep as I write this. Well, a bit more than practically, actually. Just briefly dozed off there. I haven’t been sleeping super well, either, which has made me all the more susceptible to the exhaustion work has been bringing to bear. Every single aspect of my job that is incredibly exhausting has come up just this past week, too: pysical labor testing, repetitive testing, complex testing, my coworkers being unreliable, my coworkers leaving me to do all the work, my boss being unreasonable about something dumb, pro “AI” conversations, and on and on and on… It’s enough to make me want to lay down on my office floor face-first amd weep into the too-thin carpet.

Instead of being able to do that or even just take it a little bit easier than I might otherwise, I’ve had to consistently keep stepping up my efforts because of the failures of my coworkers. Not always malicious ones, mind you, but one keeps doing stuff that “tweaks” his back and the other is getting increasingly difficult to corral, probably due to burnout, fatigue, his increased thoughts of retirement, and “investigation” into using whatever “AI” tool my employer’s IT department has approved of to help him come up with ideas for testing (which has all been super basic shit like “negative numbers” or “quit without saving” or “try to interrupt the window while entering information,” so the fact that he’s claiming this is helping him has me more concerned about his well-being than I otherwise would be). Neither of them is trying to make my life more difficult or stressful, but they keep managing to do it. I mean, I’ve had to completely pick apart and rebuild my coworker’s test setup because he vanished without warning the other day (due to the aforementioned back-tweaking) and wasn’t around to explain it to me when the code we needed to test finally arrived. Which I only had to do because he didn’t think it was worth the time to explain the setup before then, despite my requests that he do so, because he was “going to be here the whole time anyway,” so that was a full day of work wasted because I had to figure everything out on my own since even trying to talk to him about it got me nowhere because he and I think and describe things very differently. And the other one, despite being the senior tester with a decade and a half of testing experience on me has needed his hand held the entire time we’ve been going through this latest testing effort. Considering that he used to test this stuff when the team was newly formed, I’m at a loss as to why this incredibly basic testing stuff is such a struggle for him. Maybe it’s the lack of practice at this side of things, maybe it’s his much different approach to testing not being suited to this kind of focused effort, or maybe it’s the burnout I can see in him that he doesn’t talk about. Regardless, it’s more work on my part, and I’m only still doing it because it’s less work than doing it all myself.

I’m also rapidly approaching a likely frustrating situation. I’ve got this latest testing project that is definitely the highest priority work we testers have. I’ve also got another testing project, the one I’ve been working at on-and-off since December, that will be starting up again soon when some necessary parts arrive, and that is also the highest priority work we’ve got. I expect to go in to my regular one-on-one with by boss, ask for a priority order for these things, and get told that both of them should be my highest priority. Which is, of course, impossible, a fact that my boss is sure to tell me to figure out myself, despite the fact that I’m still only capable of doing one thing at a time. No matter how good I might be at juggling tasks, I will never be able to actually do two things at once, and so one thing must take priority over the other. I’m sure I could just spend half my week working on one thing and the other half working on the other (which is probably what my boss expects), but reality rarely allows for such a clean breakdown of tasks and effort and one’s time. There will quickly be a moment where I have to pick one thing over the other and will do so because that’s my job, so all I can do is hope that I pick whichever one my boss thinks is more important even if he’s been avoiding saying it when I’ve asked. No idea why he is this way, but I’m getting really sick of the whole “I’m sure you can figure something out” approach he has taken. Mostly because I do, eventually, have to figure something out so I can do my job and that seems to justify this approach of his despite the fact that things are getting delayed and falling behind because I’m somehow expected to do more than one person’s worth of work. And this isn’t just because I’m an efficient worker who can do a lot in a week. This is my boss fundamentally misunderstanding how my job works and how we testers work, in a way that I can never seem to get him to understand. All of this will fall apart eventually, I’m sure, and all I can hope for is that I’m somewhere else when it happens.

This has really not been a good week for me to be as sleep-deprived as I am. I’m managing somehow (mostly judiciously applied caffeine), but its a struggle on top of everything else. The upside is that being this sleep-deprived meant that I had no choice but to get organized and create a tracking system for the work we have to do. It remains to be seen if any of my coworkers will adopt it or completely ignore it [they chose to completely ignore it, which is fine I guess since I already got everything done that needed that level of organization before they got around to helping], but I think I can convince them to stick with it whenever they’re ready to work again [I couldn’t]. It’s a good representation of the work being done and how much remains to do, but requires an additional step to maintain, beyond just doing the work and saying it’s been done. I think it’s valuable enough to be worth the thirty extra seconds it adds, but my coworkers don’t always agree with me on stuff like this and would rather occasionally repeat work than lean into an organization system that requires anything more than a box to check or item to cross out. I sometimes worry that I’m being too harsh on them, when I write about them or talk about them with my friends, but then weeks like this happen and I’m reminded of exactly why I was so mad when they complained to my boss about me not appearing to be doing any work. I was actually working, then, keeping things running and making progress on the less visible work of testing, and now they’re barely working at all, even when we’re doing something together, and I somehow find myself doing more than my two more senior coworkers combined. And I’m not even working that hard! I’m just efficient and focused. Guess I should slack off more so I’m not doing so much more work than them…