Friday, January 13, 2006

Workin' for the man every night an' day...

I can't believe that it's Thursday night. (Well, OK, it's Friday morning, barely.)

I can't believe that it's 12:28 a.m., on a night that I got off work at 4:30 (only because I was going to a doctor's appointment) and I'm still freaking awake.

It's been a long week. A long two weeks, actually.

Without being hideously disloyal to my new employer (who I really, really love), the process of "going live" for our latest major client has been a minefield of screw-ups, and we've hit a whole bunch of them in the 10 short days since we cut live. Our small band of intrepid warriors have been battling bad converted data, bad software and systems interfaces, and a genuine lack of disseminated data about the client. Consequently, I've been at the office until 1 AM the last three days, and this weekend promises to be another long one.

There have been thoughts, especially in the last 24 hours, that I've given up one form of being half-alive for a slightly better-compensated form of the same condition. That there has to be more to life than this. That I did much better at this schedule at thirty-eight than I am doing at forty-eight. My info-technology skills picked up a lot of rust and barnacles over the last three years of getting into (and out of) seminary, and I have heard the voices in my head saying, "You're just not the right person for all this."

But the primary fact I learned from my 12 years at Sprint was that a sense of humor was critical to survival - even more critical than having the right data. And it's also important to realize what a "bad day" really looks like. As Robert Fulghum once wrote, "It's important to remember that a lump in your oatmeal and a lump in your throat and a lump in your breast are not all the same lump."

For now, I am grateful to have what I have - and more than ready to be "workin' for the weekend."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

another good proverb to remember at a time like this: "when you are up to a__ in alligators it is hard to remember that your orders are to drain the swamp."

Michael Dodd said...

Fortunately this weekend will only happen one moment at a time. And you know what you can do one moment at a time with the help of HP. (No, not Hewlett Packard!)

Anonymous said...

Hang in there, buddy. You're gonna be fine. Just fine...

The neat thing about working on projects is that they have an end date. Hopefully, they have a post mortem, also. Good for the soul, those two things - knowing this is gonna end, and the team is gonna sit down and rap about it.

Not unlike life on Planet Earth, come to think of it... :)

Jonathan said...

I like that quote.

isabella mori said...

hi there

been following your blog for a while ...

this entry makes me think a bit about my situation. i'm self employed again, and there's a lot of late nighters. but boy, do i ever prefer working for myself until 2 am than working for someone else until 11 am. like you, i like my current employer MUCH better :) so the working-too-much lump i'm dealing with right now is much better than the one from two years ago ...

hang in there ...

hope you're having an eabsolutely exquisite weekend as you're reading this

isabella