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.
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Off-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.
Continue readingOverwhelmed By Change
Today, I got a new computer at work. After seven years and two false starts, I finally got a new computer. Now, there was nothing horribly wrong with my old one, other than being kinda old already when it was refurbished and given to me seven years as I started my job, but it did occasionally shut itself off without warning and then refuse to turn on for about fifteen minutes, so I was fairly overdue for a new one. That issue never seemed to gain me much ground when it came time to discuss new computers, though, since it mostly happened while I wasn’t at work and happened less than once a month, on average. There was a known work around and it shut itself down safely, so it wasn’t much of a problem most of the time. Which probably sounds pretty bonkers to you, reader, but it had been happening since six months into my tenure at my current job and I got used to the occasional mishaps. That’s why I started shutting my computer down every night since, if I power cycled it every day after work, it lowered the frequency at which the problem happened and meant that it was usually night when my computer hit the “on for 3-5 hours so I’m just going to shut down” mark and the only downside to that was that my headphones might not be charged when I got into work. I’d adjusted. I was used to it.
Continue readingTrying To Take It Easy This Week
I took a day off this week. I spent all day Sunday convincing myself to spend one single day’s worth of PTO so that I could have an extra day added to my weekend. It was actually incredibly difficult and I only fully committed to my choice when it was one in the morning and I still wasn’t asleep. I just couldn’t imagine trying to do a day of work, much less one of my ten or eleven hour days of work, on so little sleep, so I submitted a PTO request, notified my boss, and changed my alarm time so that I’d wake up with just enough time to work out before my late-morning therapy appointment. I also had another appointment, to get some blood work done as part of monitoring a medication I’m taking, so it made sense to just take the day off, get some rest, and then, as a result of taking the PTO, force myself to work a week of normal, eight-hour days. Part of forcing myself to stick to those normal work days is the fact that I wouldn’t get paid for any overtime I worked until I passed the forty hour mark with non-PTO hours and doing so would also pretty much make taking a PTO day pointless since working those extra hours would negate whatever rest I got. So I’ve done my best to work eight hours days since then and mostly failed because this week wound up being so much busier than I expected, but at least I can just leave early on Friday come hell or high water.
Continue readingLate-Winter Depression Posting
Thanks to a bit of foresight at the outset of my current surge of depression, I switched up my therapy schedule so that I’m seeing my therapist every week for the time being. I had no way of knowing during that first week that it would last this long, but I already knew that this surge felt different than most and managed to push myself through the lethargic, unfeeling haze to ask for something I felt I needed. Which, you know, is impressive on its own, considering how difficult I find it to ask people for something I want or to assert my right to take up space when I’m at my best, let alone when I’m doing this poorly (even if, in this case, I’m not really asking for a favor from my therapist so much as offering to exchange money for a service more frequently that I usually do). Still, I was able to anticipate a need before it came up and take the steps required to get that need met, all despite the overburdening press of this current bout of depression. While these sessions haven’t exactly helped me get through this extended wave of depression (there’s a reason I used to compare my experience of depression to being caught in a storm at sea with only a raft and that’s because it rose and fell in waves without me ever being able to get away from it), they have helped me figure out what combinations of influences, events, and various life factors probably contributed to it. Unfortunately, knowing why I’m currently incredibly depressed isn’t super helpful when there’s nothing I can do about it.
Continue readingYou Can Accomplish A Lot In 10 Hours If You Can Focus
Today, after a few days of slowly circling the drain that is worsening burnout, I realized I had to find a way to stay focused despite how tired I’m getting and decided to skip straight to pulling out the big guns. I’ve been putting it off for a while now, since I don’t always enjoy the experience, but there’s no arguing with how effective it is when it comes to keeping me on task and at least marginally focused on fairly straight-foward work. So, rather than deal with the various thoughts swirling around my head about my job, my work hours, how I feel about doing this work, and literally anything else that might normally occupy my mind, I blasted them all away by subjecting myself to the ten-hour version of the He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah video (officially titled “HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA” but no one I know calls it that). I started the video shortly after I started work and have left it running all day, taking my headphones off when I need to be capable of complex thought and leaving them on while conducting rote tasks, doing simpler thought work (like writing this blog), and running the hours and hours of tests I need to do today. So far, I’ve kept my sanity and managed to be more productive than any other day this week, despite being four days into this parade of mounting exhaustion.
Continue readingSometimes You Have To Argue Even When They Won’t Listen
My most popular post over the last two years is “Don’t Argue If They Won’t Listen” and I honestly find it kind of funny how perennially relevant that is to my life. I was spurred to write that post after being talked over by someone who continued to insist I was wrong despite having no evidence or relevant experience to back up their claim. They were never able to provide a reason for this assertion and their subsequent insistence on ignoring my advice (that they had solicited) on a topic I happened to know a lot about forever changed the nature of our relationship. I was no longer willing to engage with them on anything but a surface level and I let distance grow between us since, prior to that point, I was the one doing most of the work to keep conversation going and make contact. Now, we rarely talk (this greater distance helped by the fact that this person also moved away a few months later) and while I miss the friendship, I do not miss the way it made me feel all the time. Unfortunately, as I’ve come to realize in my professional life, walking away or keeping your silence isn’t always an option.
Continue readingGrit In The Gears Of This Capitalist Hell-Machine
Due to a few scheduling issues (thanks to holidays, vacation time, and so on), I actually had a normal work week where I only did approximately eight hour work days. None of them were actually eight hours in total, since I wound up needing to stay late for a couple of those days, but that meant I got to leave early on the last day of the week, so I got to experience what it was like to be home by about five or six, have dinner eaten and cleaned up before seven, and then to have an entire evening to myself after work for the first time in longer than I can remember. Even before my shift to working fifty-hour weeks when I moved over the summer (to account for my change in rent), I was working forty-five to fourty-seven and a half hours every week. I occasionally did a forty-hour week in 2022, but the last time I did them reliably was at some point in 2021 when we were still dealing with pandemic strain on my employer’s finances and I couldn’t work extra hours. I don’t remember when that limitation got removed, but it has probably been around two and a half years, give or take a couple months.
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