After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.
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Unwelcome Invisibility In The Workplace
I seem to be unable to have a normal week after a vacation, still. Antidepressants and taking time to rest haven’t helped at all with that particular problem. At least this time, it’s a problem I can roll with, to a degree. To a degree. See, I had my usual Wednesday of meetings, but I discovered that there was yet more stuff going on that I didn’t know about and got to witness multiple people assign credit for the work I’d been doing the past three months to my senior coworker. Who, thankfully, spoke up to say he didn’t do it, but it shouldn’t have happened from the beginning considering all the people in that meeting knew about the issue at hand because I told them about. I am also on the record just two weeks prior saying that my senior coworker, due to the timing of his vacations, was relatively uninvolved in the related testing (though I left out that he found the first hint of this problem and promptly dropped the entire thing on my lap rather than continue to work on it himself). But no. Everyone was operating under the assumption that my coworker was the person who knew what was up and had been doing the three-digit number of hours of testing involved. All of which came around and made a pretty fine point as a plausible explanation for why people were being so weird about me working from home and not having some kind of publically available accounting of my work. If everyone assumed that most of the work I’ve been doing was done by my senior coworker, it would explain a lot of stuff going back a few years.
Continue readingThis Hyperfixation On My Own Energy Levels Will Hopefully End Soon
Way back in 2015, I went on a pretty hardcore diet. I was trying to pick up running (long story) and having issues because of how hard it was on my legs (from knees on down), so I thought I’d try to lose some weight and see if running worked better. I took a severe, rather limiting approach that drove a significant lifestyle change I was hoping to maintain (that lasted until I went to a convention, slacked off on the severity of my limitations, and never picked it back up again), and it was all I could think about for a solid month. I had cut down my calorie intake to an incredibly low number and was fighting through the feelings of hunger that plagued me as my appetite slowly shrunk and my body adapted to burning stored fat rather than recently consumed food, so it was kind of at the forefront of my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on something else. It was all I talked about with my friends, in my group chats, and around my D&D group, so much so that I eventually realized it and (unsuccessfully) tried to stop talking about it. This past week of recovering my executive function has been kind of like that. Getting something back that I’ve been missing for so long–years and years–has consumed my mind and attention to the point that I’ve written about it every single day this week. I’m sure I could try to jog my mind away from this topic, but I’m not sure I want to yet since, well, this is a part of my lived experience and very important to me.
Continue readingFire Drill Flight Risk
Every place that has some kind of fire alert system has a policy for what to do when that system alerts people to a fire. We start practicing this stuff as kids, in daycare or preschool or kindergarten or whatever you call your first educational experience, and continue into our adulthood. I missed a few years in there, since I was homeschooled. My mother tried to do a fire drill once, back when she was convinced that she could just have “school” happen at our house the same way it would at the local Catholic school that she would have otherwise sent us to, but it went poorly and she never tried again. We did get “fire escape ladders” to hang out our bedroom windows though, in case we needed to get out of our bedrooms and the door was blocked by fire, but I think the only one that got used was when my brother snuck out of the house using it, breaking the screen he dropped in the process. Anyway. I did fire drills in high school, in college (in various places: once while in class, thrice while in different dorms, and then yearly at the theater I worked at but that was a very different experience), at both my post-college jobs, and even at a couple apartments. They’re all basically the same, with a few important differences. In every single case, you get out of the building, attend to any people who might be on fire (to a degree), get away from the fire, wait for the all-clear signal, and then go back inside where you have to spend the rest of the day pretending your whole day has not been turned upside down by this disruption. Or, in my recent case, stare longingly at your car as it tempts you to just drive away since it’s unlikely that anyone will notice your absence.
Continue readingTreading Water At Work While Trying To Manage An Intern
The week I’m writing this, I am the only tester on my team who is in the office. The other two are away on multi-week vacations, coincidentally overlapping during what could be described as the busiest period of the summer so far. I’m sure neither one of them did this on purpose. It’s not like any of us knew this week was going to be busy until Thursday of last week and it was far too late to do anything about it then. So, to make up for the lack of other testers and the large amount of work that needs doing every day, I’ve been strictly managing my time at work and bouncing between a large variety of tasks. It is incredibly exhausting, I’ll be honest, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be have gotten less done than if I’d been able to just do my own thing rather than constantly need to reprioritize as something new crops up. Still, I’ve managed to keep on top of everything so far, for three days in a row, other than the testing intern. He’s supposed to be running some tests the senior tester gave him before he left, but I think he’s not actually doing that, given the lack of questions and how the two times I’ve gone to check on him, he’s had to wake up his computer and log back in to show me what he’s supposedly been working on. Since the first time that’s happened, I’ve been keeping on eye on him from the lab or my office, wherever I’m working, and noticing how little time he’s spending looking at his monitors and how much time he’s spending looking at his tablet. I’m not one to bust anyone for taking a break or not looking busy, and I can understand that he probably doesn’t want to have this job but is kind of getting forced into it since his relatives work here (they’re high up in the company, too, so there’s quite a lot of nepotism going on here since he’s been given the most nothing job assignment), but this work needs doing and all of us testers are counting on it getting done, so I’m going to need to figure something out for his last handful of weeks.
Continue readingCaught Between A Horrible Week And Another Rough One
Between this week’s cruel irony, yet more horrible back-to-back hour-long phone adventures trying to take care of problems caused by an incredibly shitty healthcare supply company, and a few knife twists at my day job in the same vein as the ones that started this worsening burnout, I have found a new depth of burnout. My back muscles are knotting up from the stress, it takes focused effort to not clench my jaw, my recently-normal indigestion is blossoming into full sourcelss nausea, and I’m so tired I could fall asleep in an instant. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I can make myself do and I still have more stuff to do that I can’t get around. I need to go buy food for myself and my bird. I can’t put off taking the trash out for another day. I need to get in my usual overtime so I can remain financially solvent. I need to actually do stuff over the weekend so I don’t spend the whole thing wallowing in misery. I also really need to go for more walks, get more sun, and make sure I’m geared up for whatever horrible weather might or might not pass through my area this weekend (there’s lots of vague warnings about potential weather events but little that is certain [and basically none of that hit my area]). All while I’m so worn out and exhausted that there isn’t a single treat, little or big, that I can think of that would improve my mood. Everything feels like an equal hassle, which is usually a sign that I’m overwraught or dealing with a nasty depression spike, but knowing that doesn’t help me any. I have to figure out how to solve this problem because it’s not like anyone else is going to figure it out for me. I’ve got no one in my life who can do that work for me and I unfortunately saw my therapist the morning before this entire week went to hell, so I’ve got another week and a half before my next appointment.
Continue readingBurned Out Beyond Storytelling
It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!
Continue readingThe Worst My Burnout Has Ever Been Continues To Get Worse
The past few weeks of banging my head against the same problem at work (on top of everything else going on the last few months) has burned me out worse than ever. I really wish I could say this and, with ANY degree of confidence, tack on that this was as bad as it could get, but I keep finding new depths. For instance, I spent the whole weekend resting and don’t feel any better going into work today than I did leaving work at the end of last week. Well, I mean, I feel a little better, but only because I’ve yet to work the full day since I’m writing this in the morning instead of the evening. That hardly counts in the face of how utterly exhausted I feel every moment of every day [how right I was… Evening came around and left me feeling worse than I did before the weekend]. Whatever rest I’d gotten this past spring was largely undone by how things have been going at work, between a lack of project clarity, the loss of trust in my coworkers, and my boss being so weird and evasive about things. There’s no way any amount of feeling well-rested could have survived that particular gauntlet, much less the gauntlet the last three weeks have been as my coworker dumped a problem on my lap and then dipped out of the office for several days, so it is hardly surprising that I’m feeling worse than ever. I just didn’t expect it to go from being a largely mental and emotional problem to a physical one as well. I thought I could just stay quietly miserable in my head and suffer through things until I managed to get a new job or pay off enough of my loans that I didn’t need to work as much anymore. Turns out that I was wrong.
Continue readingA Brewing Storm Hangs On The Horizon
As I stand at my desk, looking at the distant reflection of color that is all I can see of the outside world from the part of my employer’s building I work in, I can’t help but think of last year’s torrential storms and the hour and a half I spent stuck in a bathroom, waiting for the tornado warnings to clear. The storm now distending the sky, wrapping it unevenly in darkness long before the sun is due to set, will not be as fierce as the storm last year that left me without power and anxious about something entirely new after I finally made it home between tornado warnings. Even if the weather reports can no longer be trusted as much as they once could, I’ve spent my life watching for storms of all kinds. I know when one is coming by the way the air feels on my skin, by how the temperature and pressure change, by how the wind blows and the various layers of clouds move relative to each other. I studied a lot of meteorology as a child, with the same fervor as I once studied trains and Richard Scarry’s books, but only because I once got surprised while hiding from my family in the woods by a torrential storm. Sure, the science of it all was interesting, as were the remote and–in my eyes–exciting places such science got done, but I was looking for practical lessons and I learned them well enough that they serve me still. I can’t tell exactly when the storm will happen, but I can tell that it will and how bad it will be.
Continue readingRepetition Is The Key To My Job Security
One thing I’m known for amongst many of my oldest friends is being willing to repeatedly tackle a problem. I will bang my head against a wall until it caves or I do. I’m not one to feel particularly bad about failing at something, nor do I tend to spend a lot of time caught up in self-recrimination. I’ll take a moment to assess what happened and what I could try differently and then get right back to it. I’ve got my limits, of course. I won’t keep tackling a problem I know I can’t solve and I’ll eventually give up for at least a while to rest if I’m feeling particuarly worn out by my efforts, but my limits for this kind of repetition and effort are much more expansive than most people I run into. This is one of the qualities that has made me a good software tester. Unlike a lot of my peers who will write up what they saw and move on if they can’t reproduce the issue quickly, I will (when the situation calls for it) dig in and keep messing with things until I either figure it out or I feel like I’ve done my due diligence. This is an ever-moving goal, unfortunately, but it’s still something I and my coworkers have come to count on. If there’s ever a tricky little bug with a lot of finicky details and no clear cause, I will usually be sent in to figure it out because I will just keep trying stuff without letting it wear me down. It’s worked so well in the past that everyone on my team knows me for this quality at this point, for better or for worse. They can always count on me to do whatever needs doing in as exacting detail as it needs (if not maybe a little too exacting sometimes).
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