Finally, after almost a year and a half of working on this one project, it has been announced and shown to the world. I no longer need to keep the details a secret, I can finally complain about my days with specifics, and I no longer need to keep to myself just how cool and exciting the thing I’ve been working on actually is. As of a week ago (from the day this gets posted, anyway), the product has been shown at the preeminent tradeshow for my particular niche of the tech industry. It was announced the night prior at a special new technology presentation event, but today it is being demonstrated to an entire convention’s worth of poeple, is getting discussed on reddit, has a live website I can finally send people so they can see what I’ve been working on, and so far the response to it seems to be overwhelmingly positive. I’m not at the convention since my employer tries to avoid sending hourly employees on trips (we get paid for travel time and all the time we’d be doing work stuff on the trip, which would be a huge number of hours even compared to my normally extensive workweeks), but I’ve already done a couple hours of tech support for it and, despite the problems my coworkers ran into, the whole thing seems to be running smoothly. Which is, you know, a huge weight off my mind. Throw in that tomorrow is the day my testing documentation is due and I, as of starting to write this, have already sent it off… Well, I’m basically done with the project now. Finally.
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Experiment Complete, It Is Unfortunately Back To Business As Usual
One of the worst habits I’ve got is my need for diversion. I’m constantly letting my attention wander if whatever I’m doing isn’t engaging enough to constantly hold it. Most of the time, it’s fine. I can turn on some music to occupy the part of my mind that wanders, turn on a podcast if I need more distraction, or just change activities if I’m not getting anything out of what I’m doing. When I can’t, though, I’m usually at work and trying to focus on something. Which means that my mind wanders to places that I have access to at work, which is unfortunately pretty limited. Though I save my webcomics into the day as long as I can, they’re still not enough to take up all of my “mind wandering away” time, much less that and my “I need to take a break” time as well. Which means I tend to wind up doomscrolling or just cycling through websites I’ve already checked without purpose, neither of which are great for my mental health. That’s why I removed imgur from my phone all those years ago. That’s why I’ve got a couple games on my phone. Those aren’t really one-to-five-minute activities, though, or things that work great it a “work a bunch and then take a break” style work day structure. What I’ve found that works well, though, especially after having a couple chances to try it out recently, is Final Fantasy 14. Unfortunately, I can only use that as my distraction when I’m working from home.
Continue readingIdle Thoughts About Working From Home
I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.
Continue readingCatching Bugs On The Weekend: Then And Now
Last weekend, on a Saturday (the first of February, 2025, for anyone reading this disconnected from when I’m posting it), I woke up after barely five hours of sleep to the calming tones of my alarm and hauled myself out of bed so I could go to work. I had to work for at least a few hours that day, thanks to someone else’s fuckup (or, to hear them tell it, me not being able to properly anticipate that they would take my testing equipment without a word to me), so I hauled my way through my morning routine as I did something I hadn’t done in about fifteen years. It was difficult and I did not enjoy needing to cut myself short on sleep in order to go into the office to do work that I’d have had ample time to do if someone else hadn’t messed up my week so horribly. As I went through the motions, prepared my coffee, and made myself ready to stop at the pharmacy on my way in, I had the strangest feeling that something was missing from my morning. I eventually figured it out as I got into my car to drive away, since the feeling eventually grew into the faintest echoes of a song I would know anywhere from its opening notes alone. It was a bit of music that had once featured prominently in some of my more recent playlists as a calming instrumental piece but that I’d recently moved away from, as I shifted into new playlists that better matched how I’ve felt this past year and am feeling today, which made it easy enough to reclaim. It was the National Park theme from Pokémon: SoulSilver (or just Silver).
Continue readingPutting My Annoyingly Competitive Coworkers To Work
Last week, I wrote about how I was feeling better and how I was kind of excited about being able to actually put in some effort at work without feeling awful for a week or more. I wound up setting a personal record for testing cycles performed entirely on accident. I’d forgotten that my previous record was counted using only half of what I’m now calling a cycle (since I was testing something else then), so I’d only done thirty cycles in a single day back when I was still feeling fairly hale despite all the pain I was in last summer and on Friday I wound up doing thirty-seven (specifically to smooth out the total count to a nice round number). I paid for it all weekend, of course, but I was feeling mostly better by Sunday and back to about ninety percent by the time I hauled myself into work yesterday morning (or, well, a week ago yesterday as you’re reading this). I felt well enough to log another thirty cycles, even, and woke up today feeling mostly alright. My hands are in the worst shape, between the blisters, the muscle tightness, and the lingering tenderness from my burns almost three weeks ago, but even so I’m able to keep up the work and wound up logging an impressive fifty cycles. The problem is, while I’m making great progress on this testing, it will take me weeks to get to the total number I need to call this test finished. After all, even if I can keep up doing fifty a day–or even get it up to my target of one hundred–that’s still ten to twenty days of work to get to one thousand (the number we’ve picked for this test). I need it to happen faster than that and I’d really prefer to not be exhausting myself every day given how much OTHER work I still need to do before this project is finished.
Continue readingI Now Have Proof That I’m Doing Better
So, I’m most of the way through my first week back in the office after my vacation and had my first physical therapy appointment since I started feeling better. While I’m definitely feeling a little strain from being back at work and being physically active again for the first time in a couple weeks, I had a remarkably different experience during my physical therapy appointment. Not only did I do enormously better on all the physical assessments than I did in my last appointment (a month ago), my therapist was so positive about my recovery that we put aside all the stuff we’d been working on in past appointments to address another problem I’ve had on and off for years. It was great to feel like things were finally working out for me after spending so much time in pain and feeling like I just wasn’t making any progress. I will probably go back to doing some kind of exercises once my recovery from that medication I was taking is finished, but it will probably be much more focused on taking care of my body and building good workout habits than on trying to fix my back. The more time that passes, the more it seems like that problem was tied directly to the side effects of the medication I was on and less on swapping mattresses. I mean, swapping mattresses was definitely a part of the issue, but I think that I’d have gotten through that relatively quickly on my own if I hadn’t been taking the joint and muscle pain and stiffness suite of medications. In retrospect, it feels almost kind of silly to think about how worried I was that all that pain and discomfort was a permanent problem.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Hope And Frustration: The Story Of 2025
As I spend time during the last few days of my vacation rebuilding my buffer and trying to get myself some breathing room to write (and some breathing room to miss a day of writing by loading up some posts that could be dropped in as-needed, though I’m struggling to come up with enough topics that can be dropped in without any acknowledgment of the day they were written), one of the things I’m noticing as I consider the end of this period of rest is that I’m kind of ready to be doing things again. I think I’m going to get a couple weeks in and be exhausted again, since that’s just how the last few years of my life have gone, but I am trying to convince myself that I’ve got reasons to hope for something better than what was going on before this break. After all, as of the day I’m writing this, I’m three weeks of the medication I was taking for almost all of 2024 and not only can I walk down stairs again without needing to brace myself, I’m back to healing pretty quickly and my back rarely hurts the way it used to on a “good” day. Hell, barely any part of me hurts or aches in comparison to how I felt even a month ago. My muscles and joints still ache, sure, but it’s a 1-3 ache rather than a constant 5 (numbers are out of 10 on the pain scale). It’s a VAST improvement and it is giving me hope that I’ll be able to actually feel better and rested in the upcoming busy months. Or that I’ll at least not get progressively worse every day.
Continue readingOne Last Check-In Before The End Of 2024
Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.
Continue readingCoping With The Specter Of Human Fragility
I mentioned in last week’s “welcome” post about the stress I was dealing with as I was forced to confront the fact that the products I work on and test are zero steps removed from the potential to cause significant structural damage, debilitating injury, or even death if things go wrong enough or are used deliberately incorrectly. It was all for a presentation that didn’t REALLY go the way I’d hoped it would–either completely silent as everyone grappled with the fact that the Specter of Human Fragility loomed large over all the work I do or vocal recognition of the same–but I have also been thinking about it pretty much ever since. Not constantly, mind you. I’d be pulling my hair out if I was constantly thinking about it. I can put the thoughts away for a time now that the presentation is over and I don’t have my usual anxiety constantly bringing it to the front of my mind. Which has made me wonder why the presentation made me anxious enough to think about the potential for harm inherent in my work while the potential for harm inherent in my work doesn’t seem to register nearly as much. I’ve also been polling my coworkers about how they think about it, if they think about it all, and how they handle the thought all the while. Most of them seem to handle it much like I do (just not thinking about it/working to ignore it) and the few deviations aren’t particularly remarkable in their deviation. None of us are immune to the thought. None of us are uncaring. We all live with it in our minds as we each work through our parts in making sure something horrible never happens, but it doesn’t seem to weigh on any of us particularly heavily.
Continue readingTaking A Day Off: The Ups And Downs
You might think that, given how much I’ve been struggling to sleep and how I’m still fairly recently returned to the land of full consciousness and awareness after more than a month of forgetfulness and grey fog, I would take it easier on myself at work or even make use of my ample time off to cut myself some slack at work rather than continue to push myself to do as many fifty-hour work weeks as I can physically handle. You would be wrong, unfortunately, since my whole fifty-hour schedule exists for a multitude of reasons, only some of which have to do with the demands of my job. Sure, there’s tons of work to do and I currently need a bit more time every day to do the same amount of work that I used to do in shorter weeks, but I also need to cover my rent, buy groceries, and pay my bills as a single adult living alone. It’s expensive to do that in my city and in this modern era. I can’t tell you how many times my coworkers have expressed shock at how my monthly rent payments are higher than their mortgages because I stopped counting years ago when it became spiritually exhausting to hear that common refrain. So, in order to have any kind of comfort and to live in a space that won’t make me feel trapped and miserable constantly, I work longer weeks and have to carefully ration the weeks when I don’t get my ten hours of overtime since they inevitably result in a significant drop in income. It’s usually better to take full weeks off than partial ones since I won’t be getting overtime anyway, unless the day(s) off in question is a holiday, so I can actually get an extended rest. After all, if I’m not going to be able to get overtime for the rest of my days (I’d merely avoid the need to spend paid time off for taking a day away from work), what does it matter to me, financially, if I’ve worked some or all of the days in that week?
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