So many things…
I think the last two years have finally caught up with me and is behind my current feelings of frustration. Well to be honest the last four years really. When my wife and I left Denver to move to our cabin in Northern Wisconsin, it was because I was offered a job up here that I couldn’t say no to. When we arrived, we learned that her grandfather had dementia and was quite advanced. Somehow he had managed to hide it from the family. So within a month of getting here, my wife was appointed his legal guardian and unraveling that mess begin. It seems like this year we’re finally getting settled in to our house.
As for the last two years, well we all know how wild the COVID world has become. What started off as we need two weeks to get past this, has stretched into two years. Like so many others, I was blessed to be able to work from home, and thankfully where I live fiber internet is the standard, not the exception. So for the most part, I have been mostly unaffected work wise. In fact, like many other businesses, the company I work for has made working from home a permanent thing. As with anything, there are pros and cons but that isn’t the point of this post.
Frustration
I swear I have this look on my face a lot.
First off, I’m grateful for both my employer and my current manager - they have both been awesome through this pandemic. However that doesn’t change the feelings of frustration I feel with the day to day grind. And to be honest, this year has been a grind right up there with baz nitches, a nerf bat, and Dantooine (A reference to SWG).
Prior to COVID, I would commute an hour each way and hit the gym on the way home. I’d leave the house at 05:45 and get home between 6 and 7 that night. On the drive, I would listen to podcasts or audio books and unwind. Now, I work from 08:00 to usually 16:30 with no breaks. I get up between 04:00 and 05:00 to get a workout in. Over the summer I picked up a BJJ class two nights a week.
The new routine is only part of the frustration, I think chat is worse than cubicle drive-bys. Some co-workers do not seem to respect the status message in Teams. To combat this point I have gotten to the point where I change my status to appear offline when I don’t want to be bothered. It works sometimes.
I think one of the larger frustrations bothering me is it seems the database group is constantly getting pulled in different directions by other teams which makes it difficult to focus on our projects/work. Most days it feels like the contributions made by the database group are overlooked, taken for granted, and marginalized. I know, and accept, that database work is behind the scenes work and if we’re doing our job we’re not noticed but damn you’d think someone would notice and say something to the team. Then again maybe this is just a perception problem that lives in my head.
Anyway, I think that’s enough venting for one post. If you have made it this far in, thanks for listening. Feel free to add to the discussion.