I am happy to report that I made it through a whole weekend without discovering some new wild and unprecedented thing happening in the world. Perhaps because I avoided social media as much as possible and have avoided going to look for what I might have missed, but perhaps because nothing significant and unprecedented happened! Maybe it was a normal weekend! Like any other! Just a totally average weekend that included the start of the summer Olympics as France showed off what it brings to the world. Which I didn’t watch, but heard was absolutely wild. I plan to go watch it at some point (even though I don’t really care much about the Olympic sporting events themselves) since the pageantry of it all seems incredible, but I avoided at the time so I could spend the entire weekend trying to recover from how absolutely exhausting and draining last week was. Which, of course, means that I got into work today and all of that resting immediately flew out the window, leaving me more burned out and stressed than I was last week. It is difficult to be the source of truth and knowledge for a project that a lot of people have strong opinions on when said people decide to insert themselves into said project and voice their opinions without asking to be caught up on where the project is at. It is a particularly futile brand of frustrating to spend an entire day explaining to people that you did, in fact, think of all the obvious things they’re suggesting, that you have returned to the basics multiple times, that you’ve done all the easy troubleshooting they suggested, and that your data is actually as conclusive as you’re saying even if they don’t understand it. Literally spent five hours today on that kind of work and made it exactly one iota of a step further than I was last week because of how much stuff I had to do so my coworkers could “just see it happen” themselves.
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The Slow, Grinding Burnout Of Constantly Finding Problems
One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.
Continue readingVenting What Steam I Can From Work Frustrations
Today has been shitty and exhausting. Not the usual kind of shitty where it’s mostly my depression, my despair at the world in general, or me needlessly spiraling over some unlikely anxiety, nor is i shitty in the sudden-crisis-at-work kind of way. No, today, I got to spend four hours doing manual labor I can’t talk to anyone about to test a project I can’t talk about in any level of specificity while being watched by a bunch of people who frequently ignored my advice and all but shouted me down when I suggested that something they were worried about wasn’t actually a problem based on the hundreds of hours of experience I’ve gotten with the product at the heart of this project. I had to spend ten minutes enduring their nattering and catastrophizing about how what they observed could be the source of all these problems we’ve been trying to solve for months now before I could prove myself correct (that it was an optical illusion caused by their point of view and multi-directional movement of the thing I was moving around). I wasn’t going to let them interrupt my data collection to do the unnecessary thing they wanted to do, since that would require dismantling the current test, doing an entirely different test, setting my current test back up again, and then calibrating the measuring tools again. It took me all of a minute to prove they were wrong when I finally set their test up in a much faster and easier way than they thought it had to be done. As I moved to continue testing following their reluctant agreement that I was correct, one of them said “and now we’re never going to hear the end of it.” That really soured my mood, which is worth remarking since I wasn’t in a great mood already based on the whole “hours of manual labor while those coworkers stood around and wrote down numbers or pressed buttons” thing.
Continue readingBack To Barely Treading Water At Work
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 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 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.
Continue readingOff-Balance Once Again And Shorter Than Ever On Spoons
I’ve spent the last few months carefully threading the needle on my work/life balance. Ever since I wrote about how busy I was back in November, things haven’t let up for more than a day or two. Even as things get less hectic, some other aspect of my job steps up. For example, while I don’t need to do as much emotional or intellectual work right now since all the big, difficult, and long-running tasks have finally been finished, I am now testing what might be the one project my company has ever done that requires significant physical labor to test. Sure, there are far worse jobs and there’s definitely jobs that require far heavier labor in the day-to-day course of their activities, but this is still a significant first for my company. For one thing, I’ve been doing “testing” even on days that I don’t have anything to test just to keep working out and growing my strength so I can be prepared for days like last Friday where I needed to not only do way more testing work than usual but also reassure my coworkers that they weren’t asking too much of me. Right now, we’re in a data-collection phase of this project and that means doing a lot of tests in a row. Frankly, it’s exhausting and I’m not really enjoying it outside of the “clear headed focus on a repetitive task” aspect of things, but someone needs to do the work and I’m probably the best suited to it due to my build, past experience, and relative youth (I’m over a decade younger than the next youngest tester).
Continue readingWell-Intentioned Peer Pressure In The Workplace
This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re around–taking advantage of being in the same office to get some early feedback on the next version of the software and some early drafts of future features–I was able to figure out a way to get one of my big projects into a state where I could test it and that’s a high enough priority that I’m basically supposed to drop everything to test it the instant the project is testable. Plus, a testing report I wrote weeks and weeks ago wasn’t getting reviewed so my boss announced it was due at the end of this week to light a fire under the asses of the people who were supposed to be reviewing it, so now I have to also get that done this week, including incorporating feedback from my coworkers as soon as possible so that if I need more answers from them, I can actually get them in a timely fashion. Sure, my boss’ declaration worked and I’ve gotten more eyes on my report since he pulled this stunt than I’ve gotten on all of the previous versions of the report combined, but it’s a lot of extra pressure when I’m already swamped. What turns this from something I’d endure into something I’m writing about on my blog is how the team reacted to my decision to stay and keep working when the rest of the team went out to dinner.
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time Is Bullshit And Other Monday Thoughts
Daylight Saving Time is back in the US and continues to be some absolute bullshit. My entire rhythm is fucked up. You’d think that, with how messed up my sleep schedule already is, that I’d be a bit less troubled by other disruptions. You’d think wrong. I’m just as susceptible to the disruption of having the sun’s position relative to only my external clocks suddenly change. So, despite getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend, I’m still starting this week with less than I’d like thanks to having my sleep cut short by an hour on Sunday and then struggling to fall asleep later that same day. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do some course correction as I go through this week, but I’ve got a lot of potential events on my calendar for this week (mostly in the evenings [and none of which wound up happening]), so there’s no knowing how long its going to take for me to sort this out [the answer was still “all week” though]. After all, a lot of my struggles around getting to bed on time are a result of trying to make some time to enjoy myself or play some video games in the evening and I might be even shorter on that time than usual. Plus, thanks to all those events, I have to make sure I’m getting out of bed on time so I can actually get my usual ten-hour days in before I have to leave work for my evening events, which means my usual release valve of “sleep in a bit” isn’t available until Friday at the earliest and even then I’ll want to avoid being too late to work on Friday since I don’t think I’ll be able to bank any extra time this week to balance out any days that have to end early.
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