Robin waits for me to pause for a breath and then asks if I’m done being a jack ass or not?
Should I Scream?
Tag: Stress
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?
I’m Annoyed
Not going into specifics here, but has tonight been the most annoying night ever? I had errands to run after work and they all went down the crapper. My back is hurting. I don’t know if it’s a muscle thing or a kidney stone. I don’t know how to tell the different. My stomach has been pissed at me all day. I threw my diet into a tailspin while on vacation for a week, and then threw it into another tailspin just by trying to get back to normal.
I feel like the universe is pissed at me. Is the universe pissed at me?
Also, I really don’t want to drive to the office tomorrow. grumblegrumblegrumble.
Someone has a Case of the Mondays
It is Monday again. Blah.
I have two full work weeks (counting today) left before we go on vacation. Today is the start of what I expect will be a long two weeks. It’s weird how we just got through the holidays and their frequent days off, and yet after just one full week back at work I am already stressing out and needing to go away again. Does this mean I’m kinda spoiled rotten?
Yes. Yes it does.
Here’s a moody looking cat to lighten the moody:
Happy Monday, everyone. Blah, blah.
Mood
I woke up in a grade A shitty mood this morning and I don’t know why. Over tired? Probably. Stress? Maybe, but I can’t understand why or about what? Pissed off that the Bruins got smoked last night? Definitely.
I was starting to feel a little more relaxed over the last hour or so. Just generally calming down. Unfortunately I now have to go into a two hour meeting so… yeah.
Happy Tuesday, boys and girls. Let’s try to keep the grrrrrrrrr to a minimum, if we can.
Another Day
Today is Wednesday and it is my third consecutive day in the office. The traffic was bad. I want to go home. It’s not even 9:00am yet and I already want to go home. I am going to have a super busy, super stressful work day today. I just don’t feel up to it. Ugh.
As I walked in this morning the guy who sits next to me said good morning. I said good morning in return, but the thought that went through my head was something like good morning apart from the usual soul crushing existential dread. Another day, another walk through the shadow of the valley of emotional wreckage. You know how it is. Of course I exaggerate a little, and I also… ya know… edited my thoughts… like you do.
That lead to another thought. A lyric from a Triumph song. “Another day, another dollar, another pretty face. Another chance to lose yourself in this endless race.” That’s from the song Hold On from the album Just a Game. It’s a good record.
I think I am feeling gloomy for a physical reason. Let me tell you all about it.
When I was a high school brat I had a period where I dealt with some pretty bad acne. Not as bad as some of my classmates, but for a little window of time there it was bad. Bad enough that we asked a doctor about it. They put me on some Retin A (or whatever it was called) and it helped a little. Mostly, just getting through puberty is what resolved the issue. Fast forward to yesterday and I felt like something was in my eye. Weird. My right eye kept getting watery and that would blur my vision just a tiny bit. I thought maybe it was the start of a little conjunctivitis. Yippee for me. This morning I discovered the truth. It’s not pink eye or anything like that. It’s a pimple… on my lower eye lid. No, let me rephrase… it’s a great big muther of a zit and it’s on my lower eye lid. What the hell?
A zit on my eye that is big enough to cause my eye to water a little and I can just about almost see it. Again I ask, what the hell?
So if you’re wondering why I am in a weird funky mood today, that is probably it. Chalk it up to teenage acne coming back for another round of fun in my 50’s and punching me right in the freakin’ eye. Stupid zit. Stupid, stupid zit.
Stressing Out
Work is stressing me out like mad today. I don’t know why. I have half a mind to crawl under my desk and hide until 5:30. I won’t, obviously, but… damn.
The upside is that the Bruins have a 1:00pm game which is about to start. Good! Unfortunately they are playing Florida… again… ugh. I hate the Florida Panthers. I hate that we can’t seem to beat them anymore. I am also just really tired of playing them all the time. Can we get someone else in here for a game instead?
Hopefully the Bruins will win big and it will calm my stressed out brain a little bit. We’ll see.
Frustrated
Dude, you need to calm down. I know you’re in a fragile state right now, what with the impending wake and funeral, but you have to relax. You have to stop stressing. You have to stop letting everything get under your skin.
So what if the person sitting behind you in the open concept office space doesn’t have their laptop muted and you can hear the alert every time they get a Google Meet chat message, and so what if that alert is happening 2-3 times a minute all day long.
So what if that other person sitting near you doesn’t have their phone muted and it keeps ringing at 100 decibels and it also has the same ring tone you use on your own phone and every time it rings you simultaneously jump through the ceiling and reach for your own phone to answer the call that isn’t coming to you.
So what if two hours ago you asked someone to move an escalated issue they are looking at to another application, where it clearly belongs, so that management doesn’t start hounding you with questions and requests for updates that you will not be able to give and they ignored you (why?) and now you are both getting hounded by management with questions and requests for updates that you cannot provide because the issue does not belong with you and yet still they haven’t moved the fucking issue to the other application.
So what if the only thing on this Earth that you want to do is leave this fucking office and go work from home but you cannot for at least another three hours.
So what?
Just calm down, you psycho. Calm the frick down.
Inside the Red Head's Head 