Thursday, March 16, 2006

Day by day through "hell week"

What a set of screwball days...

Monday morning, it was 61 degrees. By noon, it was 37 and blowing a gale. Yesterday it was light-jacket weather, and this morning it is 35, with a major snowstorm showing up right at the morning rush-hour. Thank God that today, I can take the train and bus.

It has been insane at work...every day seemed like it was going well, and then a series of unbelievable technical fubars threw our schedule into the dumpster. I drove to work on purpose Tuesday, knowing that our Tuesdays almost always go badly, and ended up leaving the office at 3:15 AM on Wednesday. I set the alarm for 7, got up at nine, rolled out of bed and turned the laptop on in my underwear.

I didn't even get to put pants on until 3:30 PM. So much for staying home and doing the laundry...

My boss and her 2nd-in-command (who I'd sent home on the 10:40 train on Saturday) were online with me until 2 AM. They, of course, made it into work just FINE on Wednesday, and caught the lion's share of the raw-sewage that hit all day. At 8:30, they were both still there.

I just don't know when it's going to end. People have been promised, and then withdrawn. We're still going backwards, in terms of our work load. And I'm not sure who's going to quit first - personally, I'm betting on our team-2nd-in-charge, who's older (56), talented (in payroll for 30 years), and very, very tired of all the stinky-stuff. But when (not if) she goes, our every-other-week Gethsemane will just get that much worse.

Now I know the whole one-day-at-a-time thing. I do. And I know you can endure almost anything for just 24 hours.

And financially, I really, really need this to work.

I just don't know if I can do six months of this. If I were a tire, I'd be replaced after the first 3 months as a "high-mileage model."

So for now, I'm left with the classic Alanon text "Just For Today," as I start "trudging the road of Happy Destiny" for this day. At least I have the promise of an AA meeting tonight, fellowship with friends on Saturday, and some tasks of home maintenance between the work I know I've got to do this weekend.

For now, angel children, it's trash day, so I gotta get going. Peace...

3 comments:

Trev Diesel said...

I know this may not sound like much in your real-world "crazy-ass job" reality ...

... but sending prayers and light your way for peace for you and your co-workers.

Keep a smile on.

Anonymous said...

Keep on swimming, Steve man.

Im A Foto Nut said...

When I worked in I/T, at Hallmark, we had the same work load you guys do, but in spades. My boss got, an average 175 new emails a day. I usually got 75 to 100, and not one was a joke!

Anyway, the only way we got through it was with one little phrase, "It's only a card!" No matter how hard we worked there was always that much more to do. We got done as much as we could, working late if needed to meet deadlines, then we would go home. If we focused on the amount of work, we would start having pitty parties. It never failed.

We became our own best cheer leaders. It seemed that every time one of us got down in the dumps about the workload, another one of us was right there to give the "It's only a card" speach. Some times tears were shed, other times we all tossed are hands up shut off the computers, locked the doors and took a 3 hour mental health lunch break. One day we took the whole day off and went to the Zoo, and the Imax!

It actually got to the point that we would laugh about the amount of work we had to do. We had to cause if we cried, we would all end up slitting our wrists, or at the funny farm.

One day at a time is always good, but I always did better in changing my focus to getting as much done as well as I could, then left and took care of myself so that I would be able to come back the next day to do it again. Too much stress like that makes Jack a very sick boy.