The last two days I’ve worked ten hour days. I’m currently 6 hours into what could be another. As far as I know, I’m not getting compensated for the extra time, and I’m certainly not being thanked for it by the people bitching at me about every slight “problem” they find. I rebuilt their website to work on a new data source in two hours and they’re complaining at me either because it’s doing what it did before and they expected it to somehow change or because the data is different and they haven’t cottoned on to the fact that it’s their data that’s wrong and they have to fix it before it will display right.

I am stressed, tense, and sick of dealing with this crap. I’ve had two different companies whining at me over trivial bullshit this week, and even though this week has only been three days long for me, it’s been a longer harder week than most five-day-weeks. I have come very close to taking my balls and going home the last couple of days- just walking out of the office.

It’s easy to tell when things are really getting to me – my noise tolerance goes down. When I need to plug in and blast music in my ears just to override what I’m hearing and cope, then I’m having a bad day. When I lash out at someone for touching my shoulder to try and get my attention while I’m doing this, I’m having a terrible fucking day and I recommend you leave me the fuck alone. Especially when all my attention was wanted for was to show me something I already knew about, had dug up the means to access the data I needed to verify testing and was working on fixing it. When I say “I know about that, I’ve got it on my screen and I’m working on it right now” I don’t mean “show me more of this because I haven’t seen it”.

This week is especially hard because I’m still rubbing myself raw over something that happened at the weekend. The one sour point of my weekend left me feeling physically ill for hours from my reaction to it, and I’m still considering how to address it. One of the problems is that I can’t openly discuss it, and it is affecting my moods in general, as well as potentially my continued attendance at and enjoyment of PD events. I’ve been contemplating how to put it in words, and the answer so far is that I don’t know how to, but it may be something I need to bring to PD’s attention.

Anyway, back to work. I have some side projects to work on, and music to distract me.

Soundtrack: Avril Lavigne – Rock n Roll^[1]