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Work on the Brain
Feb. 15th, 2015 06:49 amI ranted a bit about this on twitter today, but I think I'll feel better if I just get this crap out of my brain and onto a page(?).
Basically, work is trying to eat me, and my subconscious isn't helping. There's a lot of good reasons, plenty of explanation, teamwork, and all the rest, but the gist is that I've gotten calls on my work phone while at home four days out of the previous week. Email chains are also including me and directed to me, though I was rather blunt about the likelihood of my response to any of those when not at work. I'm effectively being treated as though I'm on-call 24/7, having had one call as late as 11:30 PM the other night, and some other coworkers are (in my view, insanely) actually responding at that hour.
What's the situation at work that's spawning this? Glad you asked, because there is a good explanation, kind of.
The team I'm on are a group of software engineers who provide support on an internal set of tools used by a manufacturing floor. At the moment, some vendor fuck-ups mean that the floor is actually running three shifts, requiring 24/7 uptime on the tool infrastructure to support them. "What's the problem with that?", I hear you say. "Surely they must be built to handle that since the company has been in business for more than 75 years!" HA! Well, they're going to be soon, when the 2.0 codebase rolls out, but 1.0 is a steaming pile of shit! And there's been a perfect storm on top of that that's conspired to completely fuck us over!
Basically, this means that the two of us who are on 1.0 are kinda hosed. Manufacturing needs constant handholding and the customer is breathing down our neck and actually showing up at our facility demanding answers. I had several engineers from them hovering behind me for more than six hours last week while I live debugged issues with their stuff. In total, I've lost at least three work days to similar activity in the last two weeks.
So here's the thing. How the hell do I deal with this? I can feel the burnout already coming, and I didn't sign up to be on-call with this position. (As far as I knew, I was to work 8:30-5:30 with breaks and was rather confused when I was issued a work phone in the first place.) I'm salaried, and in theory they can kind of require me to come in, but that's not the basis I want to be on with my brand new employer. I want to be a valued part of this team. I know they need the help. I know I'm the only one who really *can* help. But I have to have my own personal time where I have a guarantee that I will not be contacted. I need that to be healthy myself, and to have a healthy relationship with my mate Dakota. If I'm in 'professional mode' 24/7, I'm not emotionally receptive or calm enough to connect with her, and that is unacceptable.
How do I find a balance in this middle of this crisis? I had been answering my phone this last week, but when my boss texted me this morning I just turned the damned thing off. For all I know, 200+ people are sitting around doing nothing and we may lose one of our biggest customers as a result of it. What the hell do I even do? This continuous-crisis situation could last until the end of March, and I definitely can't handle it that long.
Basically, work is trying to eat me, and my subconscious isn't helping. There's a lot of good reasons, plenty of explanation, teamwork, and all the rest, but the gist is that I've gotten calls on my work phone while at home four days out of the previous week. Email chains are also including me and directed to me, though I was rather blunt about the likelihood of my response to any of those when not at work. I'm effectively being treated as though I'm on-call 24/7, having had one call as late as 11:30 PM the other night, and some other coworkers are (in my view, insanely) actually responding at that hour.
What's the situation at work that's spawning this? Glad you asked, because there is a good explanation, kind of.
The team I'm on are a group of software engineers who provide support on an internal set of tools used by a manufacturing floor. At the moment, some vendor fuck-ups mean that the floor is actually running three shifts, requiring 24/7 uptime on the tool infrastructure to support them. "What's the problem with that?", I hear you say. "Surely they must be built to handle that since the company has been in business for more than 75 years!" HA! Well, they're going to be soon, when the 2.0 codebase rolls out, but 1.0 is a steaming pile of shit! And there's been a perfect storm on top of that that's conspired to completely fuck us over!
Basically, this means that the two of us who are on 1.0 are kinda hosed. Manufacturing needs constant handholding and the customer is breathing down our neck and actually showing up at our facility demanding answers. I had several engineers from them hovering behind me for more than six hours last week while I live debugged issues with their stuff. In total, I've lost at least three work days to similar activity in the last two weeks.
So here's the thing. How the hell do I deal with this? I can feel the burnout already coming, and I didn't sign up to be on-call with this position. (As far as I knew, I was to work 8:30-5:30 with breaks and was rather confused when I was issued a work phone in the first place.) I'm salaried, and in theory they can kind of require me to come in, but that's not the basis I want to be on with my brand new employer. I want to be a valued part of this team. I know they need the help. I know I'm the only one who really *can* help. But I have to have my own personal time where I have a guarantee that I will not be contacted. I need that to be healthy myself, and to have a healthy relationship with my mate Dakota. If I'm in 'professional mode' 24/7, I'm not emotionally receptive or calm enough to connect with her, and that is unacceptable.
How do I find a balance in this middle of this crisis? I had been answering my phone this last week, but when my boss texted me this morning I just turned the damned thing off. For all I know, 200+ people are sitting around doing nothing and we may lose one of our biggest customers as a result of it. What the hell do I even do? This continuous-crisis situation could last until the end of March, and I definitely can't handle it that long.
