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 readingTesting
The Drudgery Of My Job Is A Metaphor For My Life
Yesterday (well, yesterday from the day I wrote this a bit over a week and a half ago because of holiday blog displacement and me trying to bank some writing before I’m hosting people), I spent two hours turning a hefty box full of various electrical components on and off. My calculations tell me that I did it approximately eight hundred times in those two hours, using a total of four different combinations of powering up and down steps. I was trying to get it to burn out since we’ve been getting reports of issues in the field with this particular box of electronics burning itself out when users are turning it on in the morning. While this did not make a lot of sense to us, given how hard we hit these things in the lab during the course of developing them and then testing them, we figured it was worth looking into. By which I mean the engineers and my manager figured it was worth looking into and the other testers figured it was worth me testing because, now that my urgent project is done, I don’t have anything that needs to be done yesterday while all the other testers are still working on that schedule.
Continue readingI Fell Into A Burnout String That’s Dire
I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven’t had much time away from work in about a year that wasn’t set aside for a specific purpose. The holidays last winter, visiting a friend/interviewing for a job that I didn’t get, going to Spain, my friends’ wedding, my move, and then labor day weekend (which wound up being preparations for my grandmother’s passing)… All the time I’ve taken away from work has been specifically for an event of some kind or to deal with some kind of major life stress. I haven’t had a proper do-nothing, restful vacation since Thanksgiving of 2022 and that barely counts since I was preparing myself for family therapy with my sister and parents. The last time I took a vacation and didn’t have something horrible, stressful, or upsetting happen immediately afterwards was when I went to a cabin with my friends and siblings for most of a week in the summer of 2022. Which only counts because the stressful thing that happened after that was something I’d mostly gotten used to dealing with (my eye problems flaring up). I really need a proper rest and I really hope I can get one this Thanksgiving. Next week, as you’re reading this.
Continue readingWork/Life Balance Means Spending 12 Hours At Work, Right?
As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, work has been staggeringly busy. I haven’t even had time to think about my organization project this past week since every single day has been over eleven hours of constant effort and focus. Well, not every day. I had one short day, since my friends where getting married and I wouldn’t miss that for anything, but that was the day that turned my “one long day to make up for one short day” plan for this week into my “every day is a long day since there’s so much that needs doing now, if not sooner” reality. Turns out something we thought wasn’t working for one specific reason actually wasn’t working for an unknown reason, which we know because I proved that the specific reason wasn’t actually at fault. Turns out the assumptions I’ve based my last three months of work on were incorrect, actually. Turns out everything we’ve been doing to “fix” the problem actually only hid it. And, as it turns out, the problem is likely more wide-spread than we thought it was but an incidental quirk of the hardware involved might have hidden it in most cases. As of yet, we still don’t know for certain what the cause is. I have some strong suspicions and a theory I’ve been able to back up a bit, but there are still problems with that theory that I haven’t figured out yet. I will continue to work on this problem all day, every day (well, I don’t expect to come in on the weekends, so hopefully only every work day) until we’ve figured it out and then, finally, we can lay this thing to rest.
Continue readingThe Wearing Down Continues
Every so often, I just have one of those days where I forget to take time for lunch and wind up clocking out, turning to grab my bag, and noticing my lunch is still sitting on my desk where I left it when I got into work that morning. Today was one of those days. When I got in to work, I went to my desk, unpacked my bag, and then left to go check on the test I’d left running overnight. Three hours later, at twelve thirty, I returned to my desk for the first time. I left seconds later and didn’t come back for another hour. After typing up a quick message, I left again and didn’t go back for another two hours. When I stepped away to go get some files off my testing laptop, I got swept up in a “let’s go have a meeting at the local ice cream parlor” event and didn’t get back to my desk until almost five. So all I had to eat today, before I came home and ate dinner, was my fiber supplement, a Nutri-Grain bar, my daily coffee, and a scoop of rainbow sherbet at the ice cream parlor. All despite running around so much that I felt like a disgusting, sweaty mess before I’d even gone on my daily walk, much less worked several more hours and gone on a 4-mile round trip bike ride to a nearby ice cream parlor. And I was so tired by the first time I realized I’d never eaten lunch at 3pm that I just wasn’t hungry anymore.
Continue readingWork Hasn’t Been Horrible, Lately
As hectic, busy, and downright exhausting as work has been recently, I’ve actually been enjoying it more. I don’t know if it’s because I have stuff going on in my evenings again or it’s just because I’ve been working more with people I like who appreciate my thoughts and no longer feel like the work I’m doing doesn’t matter. Well, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Or, you know, both of them with most of the change in outcome being a result of the latter. Feeling like the work I’m doing matters is kind of a big deal to me because there is little more I hate than feeling like I’m wasting my time and going to work every day at a job that felt like it was wasting my time was really not a happy place for me to be, mentally speaking. I mean, I knew the work I was doing mattered, but there were sure a lot of days that it didn’t feel like it did, no matter how much I reassured myself otherwise.
Continue readingIn Memory of Being Unkown
Most of my coworkers have been with our employer for over a decade (one has even been here longer than I’ve been alive), many of them starting on other teams and in other roles before making their way to the Research and Development team for which we all currently work. They’re widely known and respected in the company, to the degree that we’ve struggled to get work done over the past year as our smoothly-operating department has been (temporarily) picked apart to assist other teams who were struggling (mostly for external reasons–2022 was a wild year to work in technology and electronics). A frequent complaint at our watercooler (which looks more like a cozy sitting/dining room tucked away in a corner of our lab than a bland water dispenser) is the number of emails they’re included on and how frequently they’re asked to split their attention to help others within the company.
Continue readingBaldur’s Gate 3 is Better But Still Not Worth Full Price for Early Access
I finally managed to get through a significant chunk of the Baldur’s Gate 3 early access game. There’s clearly still a lot more to go, based on the number of objectives that still remain in my to-do list, but I will admit that some of the fun I had while playing the game has vanished now that I’ve reached the maximum level for this early access version of the game and my power can’t grow ever greater. It’s not that I need to be more powerful to continue playing the game or to get through specific bits of content since I’ve absolutely wrecked every fight I’ve come across by abusing mechanics or stockpiling potions, I just want to keep accumulating experience points and right now I can’t. They just pop up on screen and then vanish into the ether.
Continue readingIs It Pessimism If You’re Right?
I was accused of being a pessimist today. It was a fairly routine conversation at work, a discussion of projects, timelines, and expectations for what is going to happen over the course of a project. My boss and my coworker were discussing their optimistic outlook and some information they’d gotten recently that made them expect good things. I contend that I merely brought them back to reality by reminding them of some important bits of information about the project and the course of similar projects in the past, but they felt that I was just looking for a reason to be miserable. I told them that I’d stop saying things like this when I was proved wrong and we all walked away from the conversation feeling discontent.
Continue readingAnother Rant About Beta Testing Video Games
As I’ve been trying to make my job less mentally taxing and find ways to reinvest myself in the work I’m doing that actually pays bills, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to test software and what it means to play video games in beta or early access. I’m not going to go on another full rant about it, not so soon after the last one, anyway, but given how much of my life is given to testing software and how much is given to video games, it’s difficult to avoid considering the place those two things intersect.
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