Every so often, I just have one of those days where I forget to take time for lunch and wind up clocking out, turning to grab my bag, and noticing my lunch is still sitting on my desk where I left it when I got into work that morning. Today was one of those days. When I got in to work, I went to my desk, unpacked my bag, and then left to go check on the test I’d left running overnight. Three hours later, at twelve thirty, I returned to my desk for the first time. I left seconds later and didn’t come back for another hour. After typing up a quick message, I left again and didn’t go back for another two hours. When I stepped away to go get some files off my testing laptop, I got swept up in a “let’s go have a meeting at the local ice cream parlor” event and didn’t get back to my desk until almost five. So all I had to eat today, before I came home and ate dinner, was my fiber supplement, a Nutri-Grain bar, my daily coffee, and a scoop of rainbow sherbet at the ice cream parlor. All despite running around so much that I felt like a disgusting, sweaty mess before I’d even gone on my daily walk, much less worked several more hours and gone on a 4-mile round trip bike ride to a nearby ice cream parlor. And I was so tired by the first time I realized I’d never eaten lunch at 3pm that I just wasn’t hungry anymore.
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Talking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras
I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.
Continue readingWork Hasn’t Been Horrible, Lately
As hectic, busy, and downright exhausting as work has been recently, I’ve actually been enjoying it more. I don’t know if it’s because I have stuff going on in my evenings again or it’s just because I’ve been working more with people I like who appreciate my thoughts and no longer feel like the work I’m doing doesn’t matter. Well, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Or, you know, both of them with most of the change in outcome being a result of the latter. Feeling like the work I’m doing matters is kind of a big deal to me because there is little more I hate than feeling like I’m wasting my time and going to work every day at a job that felt like it was wasting my time was really not a happy place for me to be, mentally speaking. I mean, I knew the work I was doing mattered, but there were sure a lot of days that it didn’t feel like it did, no matter how much I reassured myself otherwise.
Continue readingA Fresh Can of Whipped Stress and Chopped Anxiety on This Burnout Sundae
I’m really starting to think that I am, in fact, cursed. Every time I take a vacation from work, something happens immediately after that vacation ends that seems to completely destroy all of the rest I got while away from my job. This time, it didn’t even wait that long and then doubled-down. I had an anxiety attack that lasted a few days, wrecking my sleep for most of my second week away from work, and then, when I had finally recovered from that (so much as I can in less than a week) and went back to the office, I wound up with a whole pile of emotionally draining and difficult events scheduled within a thirty-two hour period. All of which felt incredibly trite and inconsequential after I learned of some awful news impacting a dear friend. The first two weeks of 2023 were one hell of a start to the year.
Continue reading(In)Adequate Staffing In The Workplace
I think a lot about the way that workplaces are staffed. My previous job specifically hired people who hadn’t worked anywhere else and then basically ground then into dust for way too little pay, relying on quantity to make up for a lack of quality (specifically to rely on the quanitity of employees to make up for the lack of quality training they gave to those entry-level employees). Some people thrived in that environment and some people, myself included, did not because they didn’t fit in perfectly. My current job tends to work very hard to avoid getting rid of employees but seems to be struggling with figuring out how to retain employees, especially young-ish ones. At thirty one, I’m one of the youngest people on my team and, until this week, at almost six years, had worked at the company for the shortest amount of time. Throw in a bunch of horror stories about working at Amazon facilities, coffee shops, university systems (to name a few high-profile employers who have achieved a level of notoriety thanks to the recent surge of labor violations on their parts and the resulting union drives) and I’ve got a lot of different data about what it’s like to work for an employer that has staffing issues.
Continue readingAppreciating the Sunlight and Warmth I Can Get
I would like to take a moment before the post begins to say that, if you are in the US and are of 18 years or older, you should GO VOTE. HELP THROW OFF THE CHAINS OF FACISM AND POWER-HUNGRY RIGHT-WING ASSHOLES BEFORE WE CAN’T ANYMORE. IF YOU’RE NOT SURE HOW TO DO IT, HERE’S A HANDY STATE-BY-STATE GUIDE OF USEFUL VIDEOS! With that said, let’s move on to the original topic: The Weather.
Continue readingCompliments That Sting and My Short-Sold Self
I had what felt like a funny, appreciative moment at work today. One of my coworkers was introducing a new engineer we’ve hired to everyone, making the rounds of the folks who were present at the time. When he got to me, he introduced me and said (quote edited to use my correct pronouns since I’m not out at work and I’m not going to use the wrong ones on my own dang blog, even in a quote) “I don’t know what [they] do, but [they’re] great in conversation.” I laughed, the new engineer laughed, my coworker laughed, and I shook the new person’s hand before explaining that I’m a tester AND that I have an extensive collection of anecdotes about what you can prepare in a waffle iron. After a bit more small talk, my coworker moved on and I returned to my lunch.
Continue reading“Vacation” Just Means You Have To Work More Later
It has been a week since my close scrapes with having my car run over by a truck, running out of gas on the highway, and having a mental breakdown at my workplace. I got some rest, tried to unwind, spent some time taking care of the issues I could resolve on my own, and now I’m back at work. It is, unfortunately, like I never left. Yesterday was so busy that I had a stress headache and an overstimulated migraine at the same time, and wound up spending my evening sitting in a comfortable position on my couch while drinking plenty of water with all the lights off except the dim light of my television and my always-on christmas lights. All of which normally helps but didn’t this time (probably because of how long the combo migrache had been going on), so I would up turning to painkillers and eventually those helped. Sleep eventually killed the lingering effects of the migrache so I was ready to tackle today. Except this horrible combination of brain pains is already back because today is busy as well and it’s not like I magically got used to my new underclothes in twenty-four hours.
Continue readingI Am So Tired But Will Not Stop To Rest
After some initial bumpiness that involved scheduling sessions 3 weeks out, the Dungeons and Dragons campaign that used to be my Sunday game is now sorta back on track. It’s only been a coupla sessions of more regular playing, but it seems like it having the flexibility to schedule around busy weekend days should get us up from once every three and a half-ish weeks to every other week on average. Maybe a little less frequent than that, but not by much. I would enjoy that, even if it would be exhausting and stressful to be running that campaign on top of whatever winds up taking place weekly on Sundays, not to mention the Friday game I run or play in (it alternates irregularly these days), my coworker game on every second or third Tuesday, and the game I play in on Thursdays. And that doesn’t even mention my busy work schedule with my job, my non-tabletop roleplaying game obligations, and the endless labor that goes into being an adult with a household I must maintain. Honestly, as I look to the future (especially in light of the work news we all got today that makes it look like I might wind up doing more overtime than ever), I feel myself already growing tired and exhausted.
Continue readingPost-Vacation Reflections
Welp, I did it. I went on vacation and survived. Everyone got along, we all had as much space as we wanted, and I got to enjoy having a largely unstructured week. The most frustrating part of the trip was that people would talk about doing something in the morning, I’d set an alarm accordingly (to ensure I was up and ready to go by the discussed time) and rarely was that true of anyone else. Which wasn’t really a big deal since I could just play video games or read or go for a walk or anything else I desired, so all things said and done, it was a pretty great trip. I do wish I came out of it feeling more rested, but I also didn’t spend more than an hour laying in bed, feeling super depressed before coming in to work this morning, so I think I benefited from the rest. Another week or two would have been better, but it would also have been better to have won the lottery, so I’m content with what I got.
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