Category Archives: Work

bad weekend

I’ve had a bad weekend following a shaky week, and I pretty much fell off the internet in broad terms. I had to force myself to go shopping on Sunday, and I was shaking afterwards. There’s a few things going into this, and Jeremy still being missing is one of them. The depression spiral that leads into is a little terrifying and I actually don’t even want to voice the steps out loud out of some kind of prophetic superstition.

Today is better. I’ve cycled into work (and back home again) these last two days, and the physical activity helps, I think. Felt terrible yesterday (probably due to malnutrition over the weekend) but my energy levels are much better today.

Frustrations at non-functioning code are at a high point and that adds stress to near-breaking point. If it actually gets to the point where I know I’m going to yell at someone if they interrupt me again, that’s probably the point where I’ll need to walk out of the office. So far, so good on that point.

New projects

Few things make me as energised as a new project, even if starting from a tabula rasa isn’t ideal. At work, I do a lot of projects that are repeating work that’s been done before, whether it’s integrating a feature I built elsewhere into a new place, or replicating a website wholesale with a new skin – it bores the crap out of me.

This week, I’ve been doing a project that is a clone of one of my old projects and the only thing keeping me interested is the fact I haven’t worked on this iteration of the code for around a year so it’s different to other things I’ve been doing.

We’re looking to start a new LARP next year, and that has me wanting to start looking at building a rules system, and a website, and a character builder… except it’s way too early for any of that.

I’m looking to start a new game, and the idea of writing up stuff for that is exciting me.

I also have to modify an old system to have a new feature and that bores the hell out of me.  I just don’t want to do it, but I’ve got a hard deadline on it, and the soft deadline was two weeks ago so I should really get a move on on it.

The points at work where I want to murder people are often when all I have to distract myself with are rehashes of old projects with nothing new in site to actually engage my mind on. I have yet to try automatic fire with Nerf weaponry to resolve issues, but my thought is that it wouldn’t go down very well with most of the office. Oh well.

Anyone else find the same thing? That they always want to be working on the new thing, not maintaining the old one?

Hath no fucks to give

<img class="wp-image-251 size-full" src="http://www.f291 additional resources.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/field-of-fucks.jpg” alt=”a barren field of fucks” width=”758″ height=”425″ />
Medieval tapestry contains great wisdom

I rather wish I could set this image up as auto-reply on every email I get at work some days. It wouldn’t really be appropriate to respond to clients with it, but sometimes they really seem to deserve it.

After all, I don’t care if you only just noticed after (approximately) three years that you couldn’t see a link on your website any more. If it was that important to you, maybe you should have mentioned that sometime in the last three years.[1]

And when the reason that the application I made for you is breaking is that you are doing the one thing you explicitly told me you weren’t doing when I asked about it, I really feel no obligation to fix it for you. No really, fuck off.

I am so glad I never ever have to meet these people. If I was dealing with them in person, heads might roll. Unfortunately, this is a relatively common occurrence as “keeping up with the times” is a phrase that doesn’t really apply to many of our clients.

 

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1. The link, incidentally was still there, but you had to click through to another page to find it.

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Work rants

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]

Footnotes   [ + ]