Tag: Stress

Longest Week Ever

Man… I sure do bitch about work a lot, don’t I?

This has been the longest work week ever and it’s only 1:00pm on Wednesday. Why is that? Why am I so stressed? There’s nothing going on that requires my stress level to elevate out of control. It’s just been a reasonably normal week. Sure, my dining room did flood yesterday…

Did I mention that? We have an office water cooler in our dining room. It is exactly the thing you picture in your head when you hear people talking about being at work and talking around the water cooler. A great big five gallon jug of water sitting upside down and draining into a tall cooler. Yup, exactly what you think. Yesterday it seemed to spring a leak and we had a small lake forming on our dining room floor.

I unplugged the unit and pulled the full bottle off of the top. I had put a new bottle on that morning. There had never been any leaks before. Was it the cooler or was it the new bottle? I betcha you can guess. Once the bottle was out of the equation the leaking stopped. Yup, there was something wrong with the bottle. I put a new bottle on to see what happened and it’s been leak free for about 24 hours now. Problem solved, I think.

Anyway, outside of that and the ugly fact that it snowed twice this week, it’s been a normal few days. Why am I stressin’? Why am I bitchin’? Who knows.

I do know that we’re planning to go to a No Kings rally this weekend, so maybe it’s not so much work stress but it is actually excitement over the coming event. Maybe.

Until then… 2.5 days left in this already long, long, long work week. Crud.

Nutz

Today has been insane. I took the morning off so that I could take Miss Robin Sparkles the cat to her vet appointment. I dropped her off, ran some errands, went home, re-watched most of last night’s three episodes of Andor, went back to the vet’s office to pick her up, came home, ran another errand, ate lunch, and punched into work at 1:00pm.

That’s when it hit. I had meetings scheduled from 1:00-5:00. Bam. All of them. One after the other. At the same time I was getting hit with all sorts of customer issues and questions and hectic stress and wow… It’s 5:31pm now. I can punch out. I need a nap!

Here’s a picture of the clock downtown. It’s not a good picture, and don’t let anyone try to tell you that I thought it was a good picture… because it’s not a good picture. Whatevs, I’m going to go cook dinner for the love of my life and then go to sleep.

I Don’t Care

I was just looking at the match ups for the first round of the NHL playoffs and I really don’t care about any of them. I actually hate seven of the eight teams in the East. Really. Ottawa is the only Eastern Conference team that I don’t loathe, and I really don’t like them very much either. It will be nice to see them beat Toronto (and the will because losing in the playoffs in humiliating fashion is what Toronto is best at) but beyond that? I could not care less.

Last night my wife asked me if I wanted to watch all of the Harry Potter movies in order with her. I said yes. Secretly I am hoping that I can learn how to cast the patronus charm to keep the maga cult the hell away from me. That would be cool.

I have a headache. Again. Every day for over a week has seen at least one headache. It is usually the worst right after lunch and that is the case right now. I think it’s a combination of my glasses doing something wrong while reading on my computer and the general level of stress I’m going through as a result of the maga cult putting an end to my country. Those two things are messing up my head. I’m tired of it.

Time jump. I wrote the three paragraphs above about an hour and a half ago. I took some Tylenol and feel about 10% better. Oh well. I’m super tired. Not sure what’s going on here in the office today, but it seems super loud. Lots of people working on issues together and lots of other people on conference calls at their desks. That is not contributing to the headache though. I can guarantee that.

I thought maybe I’d have more to say but I don’t so let’s click publish on this one.

Should I Scream?

Should I scream?Yeah, I think I should scream.Screaming would likely help a little.Yes, I agree. Screaming would make me feel a tiny bit better.Okay, then. Let's scream.Yes. Let's scream.(Insert sound of deranged screaming here)

— Rob (@robj1971.bsky.social) 2025-03-20T19:51:21.955Z

Robin waits for me to pause for a breath and then asks if I’m done being a jack ass or not?

Big Red Haired Ball of Stress

Woah, boy… today… am I right, or am I right?

The stress level today has been through the roof. The contractor experience went off without a hitch, but the first half of the work day was… woah.

We caught a customer issue before the customer did and went into a mad scramble to get it straightened out for them. It took a little while to get a band aid in place but now we’re dealing with figuring out how to stop it from ever happening again while also talking the customer down from their panicked state. The code/app that my team is responsible for is downstream from the actual cause of the problem. It didn’t happen in our piece of the system, but it did present itself to people using our piece of the system. Yikes is the word of the day. Everyone involved, both on my company’s side and on the customer’s side, did a bang up job getting everything straightened out, and I bet that when the dust settles we’ll all agree it wasn’t that big of a deal… but for the moment. Yikes.

Back to the home owner situation, two more contractors are coming tomorrow. One is a plumber who will put everything that was taken apart today back together again. The other is just a routine maintenance thing. I will be in the office for both of them though. I am thinking about trying to find a way to be able to stay home for all of it. I don’t want my wife to have to deal with either thing. If I work from home tomorrow it means I will have to be in the office three days next week…….. yeah, I think I am going to work from home tomorrow. Command decision made. Three days next week.

On an unrelated note, today is the anniversary of my Uncle Johnny’s death. It’s been 17 years. He was godfather to both me and my sister. He was my father’s only sibling. He had a tough life but he overcame a lot of awful shit. He was good people and I love him and I miss him. I wish he could have known all of our kids. He would have been proud, I know it.

Okay. Back to the stress. Look out below!

Network Fun

I had 15 minutes to go until a meeting with a customer. Not just any meeting, but a meeting where I was going to have to present something to them. Now I don’t talk to customers directly. It’s not in my job description. That being said, we’re all in this together and we are all one big happy team, and if the folks who usually do talk to the customers directly are tied up in other things I am happy to pitch in. Happy yes, stress free? Hell no.

The information I needed to present would, best case scenario, involve two, maybe three sentences and that was it. If they asked me questions I told the people I was covering for that I would panic quietly and then mumble responses until they stopped asking. I was kidding, of course. I didn’t expect any questions. I expected my speaking time to be wrapped up in a manner of seconds. Still… yikes.

Then that happy moment, about 15 minutes before the meeting… when our entire network went down. Oh… no… now what do we do??

I wasn’t going to be able to join the call… potentially neither was any of the other 50-70 or so people who were scheduled to represent my company… and we had no way of letting each other know, and no way of letting the customer know. What do we do?

One guy in my building who fortunately sits near me found a work around and yelled it out. Everyone else yelled it out too. I got onto the call with seconds to spare, then waited about 20 minutes for my turn to speak, then spoke my two sentences and asked for questions and there were none.

Oh, what a relief that was. Over and done.

After that I spent two hours on another meeting and now I am going to spend the next 90 minutes on yet another meeting. What a thrill! I just want to go home and go to bed.

Stressed Out

Yesterday I was a bundle of stressed out, frayed nerves because the morning commute was such a disaster it spoiled my brain for the whole day. Today I am a bundle of stressed out, frayed nerves because of all the meetings I have to go to today. I am flat out all day long. I’m kinda scared for my stomach. It took me a full week to recover from our trip to Florida* and further along than that, yesterday was the first day since that I almost went the whole day without any problems (almost) and now today I am in meetings all day and may not be able to stop for lunch. I am at risk of a bad stomach day.**

*Florida will henceforth be known as MoonPieTown due to this post.

**I am referring to post-gastric bypass side effects and various related issues. Food/diet/digestion-wise I need to be a creature of habit and routine to succeed without weird problems and I am going to get bounced out of my routine today. I’m not happy about it, but what can you do?