I feel like asking my coworkers to do their jobs should not be something I need to do on a regular basis. This doesn’t apply to all of them, thankfully, but a few that I work with routinely make me wonder I’m expecting too much of them. I mean, I’m the most junior of my coworkers amongst this cohort of irresponsible adults and yet it often falls to me to make sure that they’re doing their jobs and not letting things slip through the cracks. It would be one thing if it was an occasional slip-up, but I’ve routinely had to go to one coworker for a foundational aspect of his job that I need him to perform so I can properly do my job and the way he reacts every time I do this is like I’m making some kind of horrible, unreasonable demands of him. I get it. It’s not fun stuff to do. He’s not passionate about the maintenance project. But it is literally his job and his job alone to give me the information I need so I can tell if the developers I work with are doing things right, if they’re actually solving the problem, and if they even know what the problem is. And it should not be falling to me to do that. Every single other person in this group is either a Senior rank in their role or promoted high enough that “senior” positions no longer exist. I shouldn’t need to be the person getting the group together to address problems or fill gaps or figure out how to proceed from whatever mess we’ve landed in because no one else did something about a glaring problem I identified months ago but couldn’t get anyone to take seriously because I have no authority and even 12 years of experience isn’t enough to actually get these people to take me seriously without concrete proof of a present and pressing issue.
Continue readingwork
Chased Into A New Day By Last Week’s Problems
This past weekend (as I’m writing this, anyway) was just long enough for my exhausted mind to forget everything that was going on at work. Unfortunately for me, what was going on was investigating a bevy of bugs I’d found and all of them were waiting for me when I got in on my Monday morning. As was one of the German software developers I work with (the one I get along with better, thankfully). I then proceeded to spend seven hours on the phone with him, some of them testing and some of them just shooting the shit while we waited for the very slow test (that was supposed to be much faster) showed whether or not we’d managed to eliminate the bug by changing on of over a dozen variables. It was time-consuming and exhausting work, and honestly some of the most exacting testing I’ve done in a while since the project I’ve been working on for a while now is more of a “does it feel alright? Cool, next thing” type project than a “change dozens of tiny variables one at a time and review the results of a repeated action with each set of variables, all of which must be recorded for historical purposes and further investigation by my developer coworkers. It has left me drained even after getting a couple decent nights of sleep, moreso even than I felt the week prior when I was dead on my feet from not sleeping enough at all. Mostly because the busy afternoon wrapped up with me returning to my desk to find that a recently departed (for the day, not from this mortal coil) coworker had set up a meeting for us to learn about how other departments us AI testing tools.
Continue readingCursing What I Once Would Have Called A Blessing
Today, I returned from a very long weekend. Five whole days off in a row, thanks to a combination of a holiday and two days of PTO to give myself as much of a break as I can (barely) afford to. I took it because I was unceremoniously told early in the week that my assistance was not needed and rather than wait around until that inevitably proved to be false (as it always has been), I decided to take some time off and let my coworkers deal with their own problems for once. I was right, of course. They realized they needed me a couple hours later, but my vacation time was already submitted and I wasn’t going to rescind it, so they were shit out of luck. Especially because my PTO meant I wasn’t going to do even a minute of overtime on any day last week and wound up leaving quite early both days. It was really nice. It felt great to leave the building while the sun was still up, while the air was still warm, and while there was still enough of an evening left for me to feel like I could do more than one thing before I was forced to give in to my overwhelming exhuastion. It was nice to sleep in as late as I wanted five days in a row. I didn’t sleep for less than seven hours even once in all of that and got about eight hours three times in that period. It was an unprecedented amount of rest. And was largely spoiled by a bad bout of tonsil stones that kept me feeling like I was choking when I tried to sleep last night and then further spoiled by coming in to work and realizing that a five day weekend wasn’t enough to fix my burnout.
Continue readingIncreasingly Bitter Reflections Of An Exhausted Mind
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.
Continue readingLiteral Blood, Sweat, And Tears
I’ve spent the last few days donating small bits of my fingers to the project I’m doing at work thanks to a mix of unlucky incidents and things slipping as I’ve been applying force. It’s made for an increasingly rough time given how many of my fingers I’ve had to bandage, how often I have to wash my hands, and how I keep needing to reapply those bandages in order to keep my (this makes most of them sound worse than they are) open wounds from getting dirt in them. When it was one finger, it was easy to make sure that one wasn’t involved in everything going on so I wouldn’t injure it again. Now that it’s half my fingers (and mostly knuckles at that), I don’t really have a choice other than to continue risking my digits. Which also makes it sound worse than it is. Most of the danger is just, say, a wrench on a bolt slipping or the nut suddenly coming loose, which causes my hand to lurch into a hard metal surface that refuses to let my hands go without taking a souvenir. Some of it is decidedly worse than that and not something I’m going to share on a public blog post due to the nature of my work and the incidents. All of which means that now I have a very deep appreciate for bandages and how “waterproof” doesn’t also mean “soap-proof.”
Continue readingAt Least My Thoughts Are More Directed While I’m Still Unable To Sleep Enough
More time has not fixed my sleep problem. It has gotten better, but it hasn’t fixed itself yet. I’m able to think fairly clearly. I’m very tired still, and a day at work is still very draining, but I think I’m getting through the worst of the mental muddling that has left me in this state. I haven’t really figured anything concrete out, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I feel about all of the stuff going on in my life (namely my tendency to throw myself into projects with a dedication rarely reflected by those I work with, what part I wish to play in the various communities I’m a part of, how much should I temper my passions in order to avoid further burnout, and so on) and I think I’ve at least figured out what I don’t want and taken a couple steps on the road to somewhere. I know I don’t want to return to my old quiet days of playing games by myself and going entire weeks without talking to anyone save my coworkers. I don’t want to do nothing but what I need to. I also don’t want to give up on some of the things I’ve started, not entirely, even if they can be draining. I know I need to continue to work on balancing the energy I spend against the rest I’m getting. I also know that I want to be a part of communities and that community doesn’t happen without people to oragnize it and do the work. Someone has to be the person to say “let’s do stuff” and while it doesn’t have to be me all the time (and shouldn’t be me all the time!), I am a very organized person who does enjoy logistical work, so I need to figure out how to find balance between this truth and the just as real truth that I’m burned out and constantly exhausted these days.
Continue readingMy Job Really Stinks Sometimes
I have spent the last week working on a now months-long issue at work. I mean, I’ve been working on it for months, but over the last couple weeks it has become a particular focus for me as the mechanical engineers and I are taking some of my recent test results and reproducing them again and again, tweaking variables here or there, as we try to find a path out of this mess. Since I work on heavy machinery and the software that goes in that machinery, this means that I have spent my time working on gearboxes and the goop that goes inside them. Which means that I finally have a job that involves getting my hands dirty despite largely being a white collar worker (well, this job is a sort of interesting mix of white and blue collars but it’s still mostly white collar since it is still a knowledge job by-and-large) and that I’m also using all the engineering, math, and physics knowledge I’ve picked up over the years of being raised by two engineers and mistakenly believing that I was going to study math and physics in college because I was really good at calculus. It also means that my poor, sensitive nose has been assaulted by some of the most heinous scents I’ve had the displeasure to sniff. The only things that outdo them is raw sewage and the sulfurous chemical solution my chemistry teacher in high school made everyone sniff on the first day of class so he could threaten to put it under our noses if we ever fell asleep on him (which smelled so much like raw sewage that it is pointless to make the distinction between the malodorus mixtures). Even through a properly-fitted N95 mask, some of these stinks send me reeling, lightheaded and nostrils aflame, any time I’m unfortunate enough to stand over one of these suckers when we crack them open to check our test results.
Continue readingBurgeoning Burnout And Undeniable Exhaustion
It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.
Continue readingSurviving The Day After A Sleepless Night
Going in to work on a Monday with no sleep is a special kind of hell. I wish I could say that this was all my own fault, that I made bad choices over the weekend and wound up not sleeping as a result because then I could accept the blame and do better in the future. Instead, I’m almost falling over while standing at my desk because I exhaustedly closed my eyes for just a moment and dozed off standing up. Not because I was too wrapped up in a game or a book but because my sleep rhythm is a sensitive creature these days and the disruption of the time changing last Sunday was enough that I wasn’t tired enough to sleep when I went to bed and, instead of eventually drifting off or suddenly waking up in the morning, I just stayed awake. Long enough that I gave up and when to go do some video game chores in the hope that it would either be mind-numbing enough to let my mind unclench or engaging enough that I could stop thinking about being unable to sleep long enough to feel tired. Instead of either of those things happening, I did a lot of shopping for supplies in Final Fantasy 14. I made out like a particularly well-appointed bandit, so I have to admit that this is one of the most productive sleepless nights I’ve ever experienced, but the day after it at work? As I try to stay focused and ride the line between immediate over-caffeination, crashing, and getting kept awake from excessive caffeine intake? That sucks. Monumentally.
Continue readingThe Joys (And “Joys”) Of Being Good At My Job
All of last week’s chickens have come home to roost. The letter I sent got responses, the work I was doing has come around back to me, and all of my crafting in Final Fantasy 14 has culminated in my plans for tonight. I’ll write more about how all that goes later this week, I’m sure, but suffice it to say that I’ve been very productive and, after lots of effort, I’m finally ready to actually make the gear itself. I’m also going to hold off on writing more about my letter responses and my subsequent therapy session for a bit longer, until I’ve had the time to process it all a little while longer. Instead, today I’m going to talk about the absolute nightmare that is this one bug I found at work. Thankfully, I found it and, since it’s my job to do that, things are going well for me in terms of my career. This will not pose any problems for me in that direction and will more likely be a feather in my cap than a hindrance since I found a horrible problem in an unorthodox way that would surely have eventually happened in the field but might otherwise have never occured in a testing environment. It’s just going to be a lot of work for me and I can’t even take satisfaction in foreseeing a thorny issue since I just sort of bumbled into this. I mean, I absolutely made the decisions that resulted in me learning that it’s possible to burn out an essential component of this product in a way that is safe but only because it renders the entire thing unuseable, but I didn’t think it was going to go poorly. I was actually looking for something unrelated that I still haven’t pinned down, but such is the life of a tester. You do a lot of inexplicable or unlikely things and stumble into bugs you never could have anticipated.
Continue reading