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.
Continue readingMusing
Lessons Learned While Building My New Computer
Last Friday, (two Fridays ago, as you’re reading this), the last of my computer parts (save the monitors) arrived and I began the laborious process of reading manuals, looking things up on the internet, and doing my best to put things together. I was confident that things would go better this time around (compared to my first computer build) since I’ve spent seven and a half years working at a job that involved a bunch of mechanical and electrical testing, so I’m much more familiar with how to put computers together than before. That, of course, overlooked the fact that I’m generally putting together devices that have a set list of parts that we already know work perfectly together and that my familiarity with the products my company makes gives me a very particular idea of what a computer’s interior should look like. An idea that doesn’t reflect a gaming computer much at all. Sure, I could easily find the ports on the motherboard I needed and I felt much more confident plugging in cables during this build compared to my first back in 2015, but I was still largely operating without being entirely certain that I was doing the right thing. All of which meant that I wound up missing something pretty important that meant my computer wouldn’t properly turn on once assembled and my incredible exhaustion (beyond the ability to make choices easily due to the anxiety of waiting for everything to arrive coupled with the fact that I only finished putting it all together almost six hours after I started, just before midnight) prevented me from seeing what I’d done wrong until I’d driven down to Chicago and paid a professional to take a look at it (ostensibly so I could just solve whatever the problem was an move on with my life, which is exactly what I wound up doing even if the problem was incredibly simple and kind of dumb).
Continue readingReflections On A Worthless Holiday
I’m writing this on the 4th of July. As some of you might know, either those in the US who pay attention to the workings of our government or those abroad who pay attention to at least the major events of US politics, there have been some US Supreme Court rulings that have happened in the last few days that are going to have enormous impacts on the US. While a lot of people on the internet seem to find it surprising or odd that the Supreme Court might recreate kings in the US while also hamstringing the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs in the week leading up to what is supposed to be a celebration of the US’s original declaration of independence from unjust rule, I find it pretty in-keeping with how the Supreme Court has acted in the years following the rise of the far-right in the US. I mean, it was only two years ago that they took down the right to abortion for absolutely no logical reason, also just before July 4th, and their entire history of actions and behaviors has shown not only a remarkable lack of self-reflection or knowledge of how they’re perceived by the wider public but an extreme and remarkable callous lack of regard for any of the ways our systems of governance used to work, much less actual history (as opposed to the fantastical history they make up to justify their actions). It’s discouraging to watch all this play out, especially as someone who has done what is within their limited power to work against this sort of this (calling senators and representatives, sending emails and letters, and trying to stay informed on local politics which will wind up setting the stage for national politics), so I’ve spent a lot of time this week just checked out of what’s going on in the news so I can preserve my sanity and try to get some amount of rest.
Continue readingI Bought Myself A New Computer
I did not know spending a ton of money could be exhausting. I probably would have guessed as much if I’d really thought it through, but I didn’t and so the amount of sheer exhaustion I felt upon completing the last of my orders for new computer parts caught me by surprise. Mostly. I did set an entire day aside for planning out, researching, and then buying my new computer, so I clearly expected it to be a mentally arduous task. I just didn’t think that I’d have to fight my anxiety twice as I did it–first as I tried to figure out what parts I should buy and if they’d all work together properly and then second as I had to actually click the “place order” button in four different places. Once I was done, I wanted nothing more than to lay down on the floor in my apartment and do nothing for a couple hours. After all, between dealing with my apartment complex’s maintenance staff as they finished working on the leak in my closet and spending a bunch of money (that I’d set aside over the past year for explicitly this purpose), I’d done a lot of mental and emotional labor. I earned a rest. I earned some time laying down on the floor in an exhausted and unthinking heap. Instead of doing that, though, I ran some errands and did some laundry. Which is a lot like resting except for the parts where I was still doing stuff. Honestly, it was just nice to leave my apartment for a bit, before the next round of storms rolled through.
Continue readingPost-Vacation Stress Management
After taking a week away from life to rest up and try to recover from the soul-numbing burnout I was trapped in prior to my vacation, the main impression I’ve got is that it wasn’t nearly enough time. I was so exhausted and burned out that I couldn’t even feel tired and exhausted until the middle of the week. It took four days of rest to even begin to feel just how wrecked I was, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Now, another four days on from that, I’m still battling a deep and pervasive sense of exhaustion even as I’m forced to begin getting back to work. I mean, I could still take some time off to continue resting, but that would mean leaving things undone. I don’t think that’s in my best interest, especially given that I’m going to be walking into the second half of my project-based work-marathon the day this post actually goes up on my blog. After all, the stuff I’m doing this week is supposed to help with making that marathon easier on me, on top of finally doing a bunch of stuff that I’ve been putting off due to a lack of energy (like researching what the actual cost of a new computer will be, where to host my blog that won’t be more mentally taxing than I can afford in my daily spoon budget, and how to introduce more opportunities for in-person socializing). It’s all stuff that I will benefit from having done, but it’s difficult to convince myself to actually do it when I’m still so damn tired.
Continue readingLeaving For Vacation Is The Most Stressful Thing I’ve Done At Work
When I initially imagined myself going on vacation at this time in the calendar year and the lifecycle of the big project I’m working on, I imagined myself gracefully exiting the scene that is my workplace with things either finished enough that there was time for a breather or with my coworkers prepared to attend to whatever trickle of work came in while I was away. Unfortunately, over the last two weeks (as I’m writing this as I sit in an exhausted sweaty heap in my home office far too late at night on the day before I leave on my vacation, this is actually four weeks prior to the day this post goes up) I’ve been absolutely swamped by work. I’ve been leaving work at increasingly late times as I’ve struggled to balance the work that’s been pouring in against trying to finish the items on my to-do list that have fallen by the wayside over the last month and a half of increasing business, all while trying to get my coworkers up to speed so that the work can continue while I’m gone since all of the different pieces of my project are at a crucial stage where they can’t just wait a couple weeks for me to return from my vacation. I finally managed to get the last things done tonight, at about a quarter to ten in the evening after an almost fourteen hour day. I’ll be able to rest easily, as a result, since I won’t have anything left dangling over my head, but I am so absolutely exhausted that I don’t even feel tired anymore. I’m found some state beyond even exhaustion where nothing matters and my numb sense of self can continue to push my body until I run out of things to do or I collapsed because my body refuses to listen.
Continue readingMy Entire Career Contained Within An Hour Of Me Being Unfortunately Correct
One of the most frustrating experiences I have far too often at work is that I am ultimately proven right about something. It happens often enough that I stopped keeping track, but apparently not often enough that anyone remembers how frequently it happens. That or they’re just ignoring it because I haven’t gone and rubbed anyone’s nose in it. As much as you might think otherwise, given my propensity for predicting bad outcomes and the frequency with which my warnings are proven out, I don’t enjoy telling people that I told them so. There is little joy in those moments for me since I don’t particularly appreciate seeing other people struggle or suffer, and I get little satisfaction from having been correct that something bad would happen when that bad thing has happened. Usually, there’s lots of work to do and my life has suddenly become more difficult as I either have to lend a hand to clean up whatever mess (literal or metaphorical) has been made or have to find a way to still do my work in what has become a shortened timeline. I don’t have the time to bask in being right and everyone is usually better served if I don’t point out how wrong they were, how right I was, and how they should listen to me in the future. People’s feelings get hurt by things like that and it usually makes people less likely to listen in the future, not more likely. That said, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I should be making a point of it more often than I do.
Continue readingThe Harmful Continued Cultural Relevance of Dune
I don’t like Frank Herbert’s Dune. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about the movies or my previous post about disliking Dune, you know this already. In fact, if you just want my general thoughts about the book, you should read my post about my dislike for Herbert’s first novel and leave it at that. This post is a much more specific discussion of what I disliked, why I disliked it, and why I think Dune should be left to collect dust in the period of history in which it was first published.
Continue readingMy Impending Vacation
In a week from tomorrow, I’ll be going on vacation. I’ll have some errands to run in the morning, including getting a blood test and doing some grocery shopping, but then I’ll be loading myself up for a trek northward to spend some time in a cabin in the woods with two of my siblings and one of their partners who’ll actually only be there for part of the trip. It’ll mostly be my siblings and I. I’ve also got additional time off of work after that, for post-trip recovery, resting up in my place of ultimate comfort (such that it is), and probably trying to get through my massive backlog of books, movies, and video games. A week of escapism, in as many ways as possible, followed by a week of rest and reordering of my life in whatever ways I can think of while also playing a bunch of video games, reading whatever books I’ve got left from the first part of the trip, and probably watching Delicious in Dungeon since I should be all caught up on A More Civilized Age by then. The possibilities are not exactly endless, but they’re pretty enormous, considering most of my two-week vacations over the past decade have been in the winter, around the holidays, and have suffered from the emotional angst that goes with them. This time, it’s all summer and all freedom to rest or do whatever. Maybe I’ll even stream! There’s so much I could be doing.
Continue readingWorn Out By Workplace Whack-A-Mole
I was talking to a friend about how busy work has been, describing it as playing whack-a-mole with problems that keep popping up because the core issue causing all of them is the one mole that just won’t stay whacked. It was a bit of a humorous moment, given the odd phrasing, but the expression has stuck with me since then. I genuinely don’t think any other way of putting it would really capture the entirety of the situation. After all, it isn’t just that we keep finding new problems, dealing with them, and then immediately finding more problems, sometimes at a pace that we can’t keep up with, but that there’s an absurdly farcical quality to a lot of this work since we know that none of these problems will stay fixed until we figure out the issue at the core of them. It feels like playing whack-a-mole and then getting frustrated because the moles won’t stay whacked. We just don’t know how to fix the core problem, so all we can do is endlessly work through symptoms of it and hope that we eventually figure enough of them out that the game can end and we can move on to a different part of the project. It is a daunting and exhausting prospect to be working on, physically and mentally.
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