Week of Mondays...

So, somewhere in here -- hopefully today -- we're supposed to be getting some replacement equipment which I'll need to provision and get into place as quickly as possible. It should have come in yesterday -- Tuesday would have been better in some ways, worse in others -- but it didn't. So I'm kind of on hold, working on other things while waiting for this massive pile of work to drop on my desk. I'm also trying to catch up on some non-work things from back before Christmas, but progress has been... erratic. 

Current events are making me crazy; I need to stop looking at the news for a bit.  

Writing is keeping me sane.  

That's all for now. 

Nope, I've got nothing...

One of these years, I'm going to actually take time off between Christmas and New Year's. This is not that year. And I've got just an unfairly large number of things that I need to do between now and then anyway. 

The upgrade on Friday went well, at least -- everything seems to be working afterwards, though I think we're going to have some emergency follow-ups in one or two areas. But I've still got to deal with the fallout from the post-Christmas upgrade, which broke all our time clocks. Which means that in addition to a bunch of personal stuff that I need to take care of and/or keep an eye on, I've got to collect those, document them, and get them ready to send back in exchange for enough re-imaged clocks to get us through January, at which point in theory we switch over to the other payroll system and don't need the clocks anymore. Could this have been avoided if we'd made the changeover back at the end of July, as planned? Absolutely, but here we are. 

Ye Gods I would love to be sleeping in.

Still... the boys are both home, the dog and the cat are being cute, the weather just dropped from t-shirt and shorts to something ass-bitingly cold and much more appropriate for the end of December, and on Thursday we'll play through the second half of the most ridiculous D&D one-shot I've participated in for the last year and a half. (I'm playing a young bronze dragon. Don't get to do that too often.) So there are definitely silver linings. 

Take care and stay warm, my friends. 

Too close to the end of the year

We've got a bunch of stuff coming up and once again it's all going to happen right at the end of the year -- basically all because one particular project (not one of mine) still isn't complete. Which is going to create a bunch of extra work, because without that project in place we're going to have to do any upgrade that will force us to re-create a whole bunch of approval workflows in a new environment. And that will have to be done before the end of the year, because it's the only way to keep this system compatible with another system, which absolutely has to be upgraded before the end of the year. 

Otherwise we can't pay our employees. 

I'm trying to retain a positive attitude about this, but with everything that's going on over the last couple of months I'm just... man, I am not feeling it. 

That said, I am feeling a bit better after finally getting to run a D&D game last night. 

Running to Stay Still

This week has been, inexplicably but relentlessly, busy. Secondborn is trying to catch up last semester's Physics plus some late assignments in English -- and today he's having his STAAR test for Algebra, so that's going to keep him occupied -- and I've been trying to stay on him so this gets done and he doesn't wind up in summer school. Work has been -- for no good reason that I can see -- just one thing after another. Nothing particularly catastrophic or unpleasant, there's just a lot going on right now. 

And, obviously, I've tapered off on the writing. Too much else going on; not enough energy left over; body needs sleep and lots of it. 

I'm still working on the Horny Superteens project, which -- while absolutely 100% pulp -- is doing a lot to preserve my sanity; the snippets of things here are me thinking through what's happening behind the scenes, so I guess those would count as bonus content. I'm hoping to jump back into it as soon as my system resets, but apparently this week is for catching up on the real world and Getting Some Sleep. 

Sleep is good. I like sleep. Sleep with long, weird dreams (that would be last night) is so damned refreshing that waking up from it always feels like a bit of a revelation. 

 

Friday Morning

Finally managed to go to bed early, with the result that while I woke up feeling refreshed I'm still kind of logy and unfocused. My body is basically telling me, Oh, so you finally went and got enough sleep! You know what would go really well with that? EVEN MORE SLEEP. Which, after the recent string of late nights, I can't blame it. 

So we're taking it easy today, and hopefully for the rest of this weekend. I've got a couple of things to do, but nothing that should require too much brainpower. Might Baldur my Gate some more, or I might finally settle in and play Undertale. Oh! Or finish up The Entropy Centre. I have options, is what I'm saying here.

How about some music to get us through the day? This week, I'm listening to Mirabilis: 

Lordy lordy some late nights lately

So, the thing about trying to wrangle applications is that they're frequently, well, recalcitrant. And they frequently need important, unavoidable things like upgrades... that need to be done outside of business hours. This is true even -- hear me out -- even when when what you're upgrading is actually just a test environment, or one set aside for training people where they can't break your business if they make a mistake. 

You might think that those environments should be available for much more casual upgrades, since they don't affect the actual business that goes on in your production environment, and can be refreshed from Production if anything goes wrong. And in an ideal world, you'd be right about that. In actual practice, well, I had a couple of inconveniently late nights last week while trying to get an incredibly recalcitrant training environment to to fully upgrade so that we can start User Acceptance Testing over there before we just upgrade the production environment and commit our fate to the merciless hands of the Computer Gods. 

This would be a great opportunity for overtime, but here at the new job I'm on salary. Which is fine, and maybe even better, because not only am I getting paid more in general, if I have to (hypothetically) put in four hours on a failed upgrade Thursday Night and another four hours on a partially-successful upgrade Friday night, I can bloody well sleep in on Friday morning and again on, say, the following Monday. I need to inform my co-workers so they know what to expect in terms of when I'm actually conscious, but otherwise nobody cares. (And in fact -- kudos to the new job -- they encourage it.) 

I would love to be responsible for a piece of software that was well-documented, well-maintained, and properly tested for quality. This one is... not that, but that's part of the reason it's worth paying me this much to maintain it. 

On a possibly-related note, I woke up Saturday morning after a dream in which Vincent Price -- that bastard -- was in a wheelchair and trying to break open the bathroom door while I was getting into the shower, so that he could feed me to the marsh people. The marsh people had apparently lived here years ago, and been subject to cruel and horrible experiments; the one I was avoiding introduced itself as having been made from six other marsh people, and looked like a cross between a starfish and a stingray. So if I ever see Vincent Price in a wheelchair again, I'm going to murder him on the spot in self-defense. 

BUT THAT ASIDE, life is pretty good. I keep forgetting that Firstborn is no longer living with us, which is weird but otherwise fine; we've put Secondborn into some math tutoring because apparently middle school has taught him that it's both terrible and useless; the dog has very strong opinions about where we should go when we do walkies; and I'm running three different D&D games which I'm enjoying the hell out of in three different ways. 

If I get my sleep schedule back under control, I'll be unstoppable. 

Here's to you, my friends, being -- or becoming -- unstoppable too.

Weird Dreams

There's a meme going around somewhere that asks, "Are you Self-Sufficient as in Self-Sufficient? Or are you Self Sufficient as in I Am Carrying The Weight Of Years Of Other People Expecting Me To Get Things Done Without Adequate Explanation, Resources, Or Support?" and boy howdy, that one hit me pretty hard. 

I have trouble knowing when I need to ask for help, partly because I think Previous Job spent nearly two decades training me to expect that no matter how reasonable the ask, management was never going to direct additional resources my way. Not if they cost money. Maybe I could get my co-workers to help out -- they were actually very good about that, but a lot of them were in the same position I was, resource-wise.

(It's also apparently a pretty common thing with ADHD/Spectrum folks, but leave that aside for the moment. I know that not knowing when to asked for help is an issue for me, and I've watched Firstborn struggle with the same issue. Which is why I believe it's vitally important for both of us to avoid being in situations like that, where our response is just to take more and more of it onto ourselves until we burn out completely.) 

Anyway based on a weird spot of insomnia Saturday night and the even-weirder dreams that hit when I finally crashed on Sunday afternoon, I'm pretty sure that my brain's having trouble processing that, particularly in relation to the New Job. To be clear: the New Job has been very reasonable in its expectations (especially as I'm still getting the lay of the land), substantially more relaxed, and it looks like for the first time in my life they're actually willing to throw money at things that would make my job easier and more efficient. 

And apparently I have no goddamned idea how to process that. 

But yeah, I think part of the reason I couldn't sleep Saturday night is because my brain was just saving up for this huge processing trauma-dump session which it promptly dreamed me through on Sunday. (I'm actually writing this Sunday evening, so hopefully my actual night's sleep will be less fraught.) About fourteen straight hours of playing Baldur's Gate 3 probably helped too. 

So yeah, that was my weekend. How was yours?

(Monday morning update: Ohhhhhh, yeah, more weird dreams last night and this morning, very definitely work/stress related. Woke up feeling a lot more relaxed afterward, though. It'd be nice to change jobs without my subconscious having to stop and process a shitload of deep-seated emotional trauma, but I forget that, well, that's just not how people work. At least, it sure as hell isn't the way I work. And shaking off all that accumulated stress and burnout feels like trying to hatch, like trying to force my way out through an existential egg-shell from the inside... or smash my way out of a cage.)

(And the way the calendar looks, I'll get this more or less settled just in time to have to turn around and process the whole thing with Firstborn going off to college. I can't even imagine...)

(August's going to be interesting.)

Taking down the office

 Apropos of nothing, really: 

(Okay, so I haven't actually poured gasoline on anything, but just cleaning out the desk is feeling pretty damned good.)

Music for moving to a new job: 2 Weeks Notice

 Infinite Skillz:

Okay, true story: at the send-off lunch yesterday, I stood up to give a speech. I'd thought about this in advance, and I intended to keep it short and sweet. I was just going to say, "It's been a pleasure working with all of you. I hope your time at the city has been better for my time at the city." Emphasis on for, as in because of.

I had not reckoned with the presence of loud-ish Mexican music in the background and possibly the secret expectations of my co-workers, because apparently what everybody at the table -- including my own dear wife, who was sitting right beside me -- what everybody heard was this: 

"I hope your time at the city is better than my time at the city."

And you know what? Fuck it. I'm not even going to try to correct it. First off, nobody would believe me. Second, even if it's the exact opposite of what I meant to say, it's not entirely untrue and maybe people needed to hear it. But mainly, I'm not going to try to correct it because it's the single most objectively funny Freudian slip I have ever made in my life.

A Minor Rant About Changing Jobs

I'm changing jobs soon. Not just moving within my current employment, but heading off to another job for a different employer at a substantial increase in pay for doing a job that's a lot of what I'm doing now, but with a much better focus, a chance to learn the ropes and possibly even get training, and without twenty-something years worth of accreted other-duties-as-assigned. 

This is being framed as a situation where I received an offer that was "just too good to pass up". That is the kind of bullshit that management comes up with when they don't want to admit that they fucked up and failed to prevent an entirely preventable situation. It's not that I got an exceptionally good offer; it's just that someone was willing to pay me what I'm worth. It's not that I'm moving to an amazingly good work environment, it's just that after years of being largely ignored, trying to find ways around weird and unnecessary roadblocks, and being vastly better-appreciated by every other department that I worked with than I was by the so-called leadership of my own, it'll be really nice to work with people who clearly want me there. 

Six months ago I suggested that they -- our IT management -- really ought to get me a minion, someone I could introduce to all the things that I do and who could work on projects that I simply didn't have time to get to. Four weeks later, management came back with the suggestion that I should cross-train with at least one of my co-workers. Leave aside how insulting that is; when something comes up with one of "my" systems that A) needs troubleshooting, and B) would therefore be a valuable learning opportunity, I need that particular co-worker to take care of issues coming in from another system so I can focus long enough to fix the problem. End result: no management experience for me, no training for my co-worker (who frankly already has enough to keep up with), and nobody in the department has a clear idea of what all I actually do.

Even so, I asked my soon-to-be employer for a full three weeks before I started with them, because I knew it was going to take that long to pull together my documentation for whatever poor bastard(s) my current job responsibilities got dumped on. As it happens, the hiring cycle for my new employer stretched that out to nearly a full four weeks. 

Turns out I'm going to need all of that -- possibly more, but that's not my problem. I have two significant projects that I'm trying to finish before I go, if I can block out the time now that word has gotten around and everybody is suddenly panicking about the fact that I'm leaving. 

And then, last week, my former boss -- now our deputy CIO -- started trying to get re-acquainted with my website-related duties, because he'd tried to add a new editor and suddenly learned that it isn't as easy as just putting them in the right group in Active Directory. That particular internal site is running on ridiculously old Content Management software, and desperately needs to be moved to something new. To add a new user, you need to go into the goddamned SQL, open a particular table, and add the new user there.

This was the point where our Deputy CIO suddenly remembered that he'd had An Idea to move that whole Intranet site over to Sharepoint. That was the point where I sent him a link to the site that I'd finished setting up for that purpose between Christmas and New Year's of 2021, and reminded him that I'd informed both him and our actual CIO that this was done and ready to go, multiple times. What I'd gotten in response was basically, "This'll need to be run past the other department heads," and then radio silence. 

But here we are, looking at this now, with our Deputy CIO suddenly realizing that this was about to become his problem, and he says to me, "I know you're busy pulling documentation together, but could you go through this site and get it up to date? It'd be a nice feather in your cap before you leave."

What I told him at the time -- on the phone, unprepared for this bullshit -- was that I had two solid projects that I was trying to finish before I leave, and I couldn't make any promises. What I actually think, after taking several hours to process the fucking audacity of it, is: NO. This thing was not a priority for management/"leadership" for two and half years. I am not the reason we are not already using it, and thus not -- by extension -- the reason it's out of date. Should we switch over to it? Absolutely. Is that my problem in any way? Not at fucking all. 

And this bullshit, years of this bullshit, is exactly why I'm not going to miss this job one bit. It's not that it's a horrible place to work, exactly; but if I were recommending it to someone in good conscience I'd have to advise that they come, work here for a year or two to get some experience, and then start looking elsewhere.

System Purge

So after yet another round of Wait-How-Long-Have-I-Been-This-Burnt-Out? culminating in a serious case Overdoing-It-At-The-Worst-Possible-Moment, I'm back trying to get myself in order. I spent last week being a fountain of mucus with a low-level cough that got progressively worse, until I finally went went to see the doctor on Friday morning for what felt like it might be a case of swimmer's ear or a straight-up ear infection. 

This was sort-of mostly almost correct. Diagnosis: negative for plague (though it's possible that there was some sort of milder Head Crud that kicked this off), positive for a massive sinus infection that was generating all that mucus (and thus causing the cough) which was now trying to push its way in to take over my middle ear (ears, really, but the left side was very definitely worse). 

Dr. B prescribed some antibiotics and a pack of anti-inflammatories and told me to keep taking Mucinex. (I'd tried both Nyquil and Theraflu, but they both dried things out -- less mucus flowing out of me, sure, and they did help me sleep, but I think that was actually making the infection itself worse.) I'm writing this on Sunday morning, and the difference is absolutely night and day: I'm still a little stuffy, but the cough is mostly gone, I've been able to sleep without feeling like I was drowning or waking myself up to cough/swallow every few minutes, and most importantly I'm starting to have some energy again. 

...Which leaves me feeling like I should be waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I'm doing my best to ignore that. Pretty sure it's not a rational assessment, just my body being unprepared to feel well after feeling that crappy for that long. 

Anyway, Spring is in the air -- actually that's mostly oak pollen, but I'm doing my best to ignore that too -- and it's time to be extra-nice to my health. (At this point, I don't think my body is going to give me a whole lot of choice.) What I'd really like is some clean living and violent exercise, but I don't frankly think I'm up to violent exercise yet (despite the dreams I was having last night) so it'll be clean living and gentle exercise for the next little bit. Also slow exposure to daylight, so that when I do have spend a bunch of time in the sun my body isn't completely unprepared for it. 

And sleep. Body wants lots and lots of sleep, the really deep kind with the good rapid eye movements. Which, y'know, I can do that. I used to be pretty good at it. Clearly I should try doing it more often. 

Meanwhile, by the time this goes up we'll be heading into the eclipse. I feel like that ought to give me vast supernatural powers, or mark the end of the world, or both... but it probably won't. I'm trying not to set my expectations too high here. 

Right, well, one more cup of tea and then back to it. Onwards and upwards! Nothing but good times ahead.

After A Week Off

I took all of last week and this Monday off, and I'm here to tell you that I am not ready to be back at work this morning. It feels like... I don't know, it feels like I was just finally getting relaxed, and now I'm going to have to sort through the previous week's worth of email and get back to work on some projects that were already behind. 

I did get a little writing done, though not as much as I would have liked. More importantly, I got to go camping this past weekend, and -- while this trip didn't work out quite the way we hoped -- camping is always good. But it's also true that some of my being tired and unenthusiastic may be down to me recovering from a bit of sunburn. I should have brought a hat. So hopefully the ennui is temporary, and I can get back into the swing of things fairly gracefully. 

...Though I suppose I'm also about to find out whether we're still in our Very Temporary Offices, or whether I need to move all my stuff over to the new Somewhat More Permanent But Still Temporary location. Hmph. 

I don't know. It was nice to be off work for a bit, but whenever I hit this point of having to come back in I always wonder if it was worth it.

So they finally did it

Work actually managed to reclassify my job. I've read over the explanation and the new job description, both of which are... basically accurate, though they omit the part where this should have happened years ago. Still, they've done the thing that I've been complaining that they hadn't done. There's even a modest raise into the bargain, and it's retroactive to the 18th. (It may take a week or two, or more, to get thing processed.) 

The Christmas holiday has essentially been a four-day weekend for me, but I forgot that it's a weekend in which we have to prepare for Christmas and then actually, y'know, have Christmas. So my restful plans have been a bit less restful than I would have preferred. Still, some things got done... and some of those were just me taking a day to not do anything. 

Turns out that was sorely needed.

No D&D this week, so no D&D notes this week; I'm not sure what I'll be filling in with, but I'll come up with something for the next three days. Probably a bit of the Dark Armor project, and maybe just some music... 

And in the meantime, it's time to take a deep breath and dive back into the dark fantasy project I've been working on.

How to Suck as a Manager

In recent news, my employer has apparently posted a job opening in the Communications department for a position that is... suspiciously... an extremely precise duplication of my current job description. To be clear, my current job description actually only covers about 1/5 of my current actual job. So at a guess, they're probably planning to remove those responsibilities from me so that they can pretend that they shouldn't have been paying me for the full range of my responsibilities over the last five years or more. Then, when/if they finally do manage to reclassify my job, they can set the salary to match that reduced set of responsibilities. 

Which is a remarkably shitty thing to do.

To make this even more fun: 

• It looks like this got posted back in early November, meaning that it must have been in place and approved even earlier than that. Despite that...
  
• Friday was literally the first I heard of it -- I found out because one of my co-workers said, "Hey did you see that position in Communications? It looks right up your alley. Are you planning to apply for it?" 
• The new position pays (potentially) more than what I'm currently being paid for the same job title, which in my case -- I'd like to emphasize again -- doesn't even begin to do justice to the full range of my responsibilities. 
• My immediate supervisor didn't know anything about it either. 
• Apparently it didn't occur to anyone involved in the decision-making process -- not even the faintest hint of an inkling of a spark of an idea -- to consult with me about how I might feel about this. Which, right now, I honestly can't tell you how I feel about the idea itself, because I'm too busy being rightly pissed off about the sheer level of disrespect that infuses everything around it.

I like my job. I like my workplace, I like the rank-and-file folks that I work with in my department, I like the folks I work with in other departments. But our leadership is absolute shit. And, again, it's probably impolitic to say so -- this blog is not private, and I know damned well that some of my regular readers know who I am and where I work in real life. 

But God fucking damn it, if they don't want me to point out that our leadership actively sucks then they need to work at sucking less.

Just Another Monday

So we're starting the side-by-side testing on the new payroll system. What that means, basically, is that everybody's still using our current payroll system, but a chosen few are also entering data in the test environment for the new system and looking to see if the results match. 

Hopefully they won't be testing the approval workflows, because those effectively don't exist right now. Best I can say is that we're working on them. 

On top that, we got an email on Friday asking everyone to get out of the new payroll system while they did an update, which... I hope didn't remove the workflows we put in already. Hell, at this point I hope it didn't break the whole system. 

So today is either going to be pleasantly quiet, or else very, very interesting.

Another week...

I'm out of town again next week, and trying not to freak out about that. I'm also starting to finally catch up on some things this week, now that things have settled down -- somewhat -- with the software rollout. (I'm realizing that part of the reason we're having issues with the workflows is that the workflows were built to model the approval processes as they existed before the rollout, while Finance is taking advantage of the rollout to update the processes to something more compatible with audit requirements. So people are having to not only adjust to a new software, but also to new ways of doing their jobs. I don't know, maybe it's better to get it all out at once like that, but it means we're updating a lot of workflows, in Production, on the fly.) 

So: this week I'll be trying to catch up on all the things I've been putting off for the last... five weeks? This week is also the first week (well, half a week) of school for the boys, and I'm trying not to freak out about that, either. Secondborn, meanwhile has gone completely nocturnal and I am very definitely not freaked out about that, what with the first day of school rolling down on us and all. 

The week of vacation was good for me, I think. I'm doing better at keeping up with my exercise, and I've been working on the writing project and actually making progress. Not the way I originally envisioned it, admittedly, but at this point I'm writing what holds my interest and it seems to be workings. The Gods alone know what the finished project will look like, but that's neither here nor there. Plus, I'm sort of half-assedly easing back into Duolingo, which I've had on hold since the end of may.

Meanwhile, in preparation for all this, I have done an absolute crapload of laundry, and cooked some bacon (my go-to stress response, apparently -- and maybe not such a good idea when Texas is so hot that the air conditioning is having trouble keeping up), and I'm trying to go to bed at some sort of sensible time. (Admittedly, Nocturnal Child is not helping on that front.)

Work still hasn't come through on reclassifying my position, but we've had a lot of turnover and some difficulties hiring people and management does seem to have noticed that. We'll see, on that one. I haven't had any solid bites on job applications yet, but I'm still putting them out. I'll stop if I get suitably reclassified.

Also, as of yesterday evening Firstborn is now exactly my height.

Onwards and upwards, my friends; nothing but good times ahead.

New Year, New Mess

So, 2022 is off to quite the start. 

Our friends' older son ("Olderfriend", who's just a bit younger than Firstborn) came down with COVID, and while it hasn't been life-threatening apparently he's pretty miserable. They've been keeping him isolated, getting tested themselves, etc. but now their younger son is also testing positive -- but probably not from his brother, probably from an exposure at school. (You may remember these boys from a special D&D episode a couple of years back.) 

On top of that, it's at least possible Beautiful Wife and I were exposed, despite the fact that our last interactions were outdoors. No real symptoms so far (we've both been a bit tired and stuffy, but that's normal for this time of year) and we haven't tested positive. Of course, that doesn't tell us much: this particular variant of COVID doesn't seem to show up on the tests very well. Olderfriend tested negative on the home tests for three days before they got a positive read off one of the slower-response tests from a testing center. Meanwhile, our boys went back to school last week and started their first full week of school yesterday; this isn't stressful at all, obviously. Oh! And I spent a decent portion of the weekend trying to sort out the nightmare farce of refilling Secondborn's meds; ADHD meds and antidepressants are both subject to very strict scrutiny, which means things have to get prescribed in very particular ways and there's lots of opportunities for things to go wrong even before the insurance companies get involved. Whee! Definitely not stressful.

And, weirdly, my sleep schedule is just off. Like, trying to go off the rails. Pretty sure that's not a symptom of anything except that we've been spending a lot of time isolated and stressed out, but I was up pretty much all of Saturday night and then slept until like two o'clock Sunday afternoon. I made myself go back to sleep at ten o'clock that night and work up a bit after four-thirty. So that's something I'm trying to work on.(It's not just me, either: Secondborn was up pretty much all of Sunday night, which made Monday at school kind of interesting.)

No word back from work on either the job reclassification or the application for the new position, which means that it's time to move on to step three: looking elsewhere. That's probably not fair, since we're just coming out of the holidays and pretty much everything is trying to come back online after grinding to a halt; but that's also why this is precisely the moment when I need to be applying for things. And at this point in my work history -- and history in general, for that matter -- fair can basically go fuck itself. Fair would have been reclassifying my job years ago, after they effectively tripled my responsibilities. Fair would have been having that additional income for the last couple of years to put towards college costs and now medical bills. 

All of which means that this week is devoted to getting my shit together. Sleep? Need to get that together. Writing? Get it together. Job applications? Put 'em together. Keeping boys on schedule? That's actually the one thing I haven't let slip, despite Secondborn's issues with falling asleep, but this would be the wrong time to let it fall apart. The mess on my desk at work? Get it together. Studying German and Spanish? Get back to it. Finishing current projects at work? Already in process, so just get it done. All of this is possible, it's just a matter of sitting down and sorting through it. 

...Which is exactly what I usually say just before something completely unexpected blows up in my face and throws my rhythm off completely. We'll see.

I don't like Sundays

I had a moment yesterday morning when, shortly after waking up, I opened up Twitter, read a bit, and then thought, Naw, this is too depressing, and closed it again. 

And then I sat there and thought a bit longer, and realized that Twitter really isn't the issue here. It's me, and the fact that it's Sunday and I have to go back to work tomorrow. I don't want to. I am fed up with my job on an existential level. 

I'm also about four years away from retirement, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of the problem. So... I applied for something else within my organization. And I'm very, very curious to see how this plays out, especially since it's technically within the same department and I strongly suspect that they'd need to hire at least two people to take over what I'm currently doing. And honestly, I'm also fucking furious because I shouldn't need to be doing this at all. 

But here we all are. 

The next step after this one -- assuming that shifting over within the department isn't, um, "viable" -- is to start applying for jobs at organizations that feed into the same retirement plan (or compatible ones). Or, y'know, we could avoid the whole thing by performing a years-overdue reclassification of my current job, and start paying me for the number of responsibilities I've taken on... but honestly at this point I don't believe that management has the basic competence and/or decency to do that. If they did, it would have been done already. 

So no, fuck that. I'm sick of waiting, and I've been sick of waiting for fucking years now. I've got medical bills coming in for Beautiful Wife's cancer surgery, Firstborn is heading off to college in another couple of years, Secondborn isn't far behind him, and I am not being paid for the additional responsibilities that I was given years ago. I am done. 

Which is not to say that situation couldn't be salvaged. It could. But that would require some sort of positive action on my employer's part, and I don't have any reason to believe that will happen. Why would I?

And yes, I'm well aware that some of the people who read this blog are current or former co-workers. I am also well past giving a shit about that sort of concern. If our mutual employer doesn't like me trash-talking them, that's on them for letting this situation fester in the first place.

Some Writing

So most of what I got done this weekend -- and why the actual fuck it "what I got done" a defining characteristic of my weekend? Like seriously, how fucked-up is that? Why should I need to feel like I'm working as hard on my "time off" as I am on during the week? Or harder? Where the hell is my time to rest and relax?

So most of what I got done this weekend was running and sorting laundry -- a solid eight hours worth, at least -- and running the youth D&D game, which isn't a chore but still requires spending some energy. Also? A database migration for a major application. And between the work I'm doing at work and the work I'm doing at home, I've managed very little writing. A bit for the blog, for Friday; and another pass through a short story involving a demon or two and a drinking contest with a human drinking partner. 

I do not want to be at work today. I do not want to be at work at all. I am behind on about six or seven major projects, I'm not getting paid enough for the work I'm putting in on them, I have no help, and I'm slowly realizing that for as much as I like my job, I really don't like my job. And I have a bunch of other stupidly-inconvenient things that I also need to do, like get my oil changed and clean the cage of the lizard-goddess. 

I shouldn't even take it easy. I should just push through and do as much as I can, and then go to bed at like 8:00 like the responsible adult that I will never in my life fucking be except by accident. And honestly I probably shouldn't publish this, because everybody wants everybody to pretend that everything is fine, but there is no goddamn way that I'm the only one here. 

::sigh::

Writing-wise? A bit more of Dark Armor, which I think is going off in an interesting direction, and a pretty good run through the short story, though I need to proofread and review before I show that one to anybody. 

Sleep? No, chronically underslept at this point. I keep trying to break that cycle, but look...

Oh, good. It's one of those Sunday nights where I'm completely depressed about the prospect of Monday morning and so I'm staying up hoping to find something that makes me feel better, which is going to make Monday suck even more.

— Michael Mock (@MockRamblings) October 18, 2021

And it would be wonderful if recognizing that offered any way to break the pattern, but it doesn't. 

Still... any writing progress is better than no writing progress, right? 

Also, as a general statement of philosophical outlook? Fuck capitalism.

Are you kidding me?

So, last Thursday was my crash day; I hit the end of my rope and more or less collapsed. Friday would have been a good day to take things slow, but... no. Instead of methodically working my way through projects, I had a lot of things coming at me; my interruptions had interruptions. That kind of day. 

And by the time I got home I was... overstimulated, overwhelmed, and done. I literally walked in the door, put my pack down, climbed into the bed, and planted my face in the pillow for... an hour and half? Maybe two. 

And then I got a call from work, because some of the forms in our document management system weren't opening, and the document management system is my baby. At eight o'clock. On a Friday night. For a system that we don't have after-hours support for. 

So I rebooted servers, checked disk space and system resources, looked for errors. The first error seemed to indicate that it was a problem with the ODBC connection to the SQL database, but of course by then it was after nine on a Friday and nobody was answering their phones; I finally got somebody to confirm that we hadn't been upgrading our SQL setup or anything that would blow out the ODBC connections, which was reassuring on one level and frustrating on another. 

And then at ten o'clock I got a text from someone else, explaining that none of the documents were opening. It wasn't just the forms anymore; it was everything. And we still don't have after-hours support, and I can't get ahold of anybody at our vendor's office. By then I'd started notifying people higher-up in the IT hierarchy, starting with my boss and the co-worker who also works on this system. I'd also tried a different client and gotten a better, more detailed error that seemed to indicate that the problem was with a particular table in the database.

I swore off it at a quarter to eleven, told the assistant CIO that I'd call our sales rep first thing in the morning and see what it took to get us after-hours support, and that I'd keep everybody posted. Fortunately, we don't have a lot of people in that system on the weekends; unfortunately, the people who are tend to be 9-1-1 operators and the Judge. 

So there I was, on a weekend when I desperately needed to be resting and getting my shit back together, waking up at 7:30 in the morning to call our sales rep directly. Fortunately, she answered. Even more fortunately, she was willing to hook us up with support and bill us later, and by eight o'clock I was back to troubleshooting and probably ten minutes after that we'd determined that yeah, we definitely needed to get the software company on the line. I'd also managed to send follow-up messages to the folks I'd left messages for the night before, saying that never mind, it was something fairly specific and I probably didn't need them unless we had to restore the database from a backup, gods preserve us. 

So it was... 9:45 Saturday morning, I think, by the time we'd fixed the issue and I'd confirmed that things were working again and started notifying people. The issue was in the table that I'd thought it was, and it was basically that we'd hit a maximum number of records within sequel and needed to reset the count. So this issue might conceivably come up again, in a decade or so. Basically, the table tracks document histories: when the document was created, when it was modified, who looked at it, etc. And it was effectively full, so when someone tried to open a document the system would try to write a record of that transaction to this table, and the table would basically reply with, "Phphphphphphphphbt! No room!" 

I'm still going to have deal with the "and bill us later" part of getting support -- the very idea makes me tired -- but the system's up and working again and my weekend is only sort of all shot to hell. 

...Or, at least, that's what I said on Saturday, before we woke up Sunday morning to find that the air conditioner wasn't cooling the house. In Texas. In August. 

I'm so tired. 

Fortunately, we know a guy in our area who's very, very good at such things, and he was able to swing by at noon. Turns out some sort of supplemental component in the outdoor section of the system had quit working, and he was able to replace it on the spot, in less than half an hour -- and for a very reasonable price. And while it took most of the afternoon, the house did get back down to its normal temperature. 

Then the dog ate a plate of bacon I'd prepared as a snack, while I was on the other side of the house sorting school pick-ups and other bits of logistics; but by that point I didn't even care. I just made myself another plate. Dog's gonna dog.

So that's where I am right now. I need to pick up Secondborn from school on Monday and Tuesday, and I'm almost deliriously unfocused. I'm still going to go into work, because there are still several projects I need to get done...

But there may be a day or two this week where I just let a lot of things go to voicemail while I tackle things at my own pace.