I’ve written the opening sentence of this blog post five times now, and deleted it each time. This is the sixth try. It’s not that I have nothing to writequite the opposite in fact.
Where to start?(Please forgive me if I descend into a rantI’m tired, irritable, just found out W is away all weekend, and that I will be away most of next weekmeaning I will miss the halloween party we were invited to, seeing the kids dressed for halloween, or going out with them around the neighbourhood)Where was I ?The children have been off school this weekhalf termand of course W works at the school too, so she’s home. Not having to get up has meant she’s been up into the early hours each night, and not been up in the mornings before I have left for work. Earlier in the week I got sucked into watching television late at night with her, but then of course I had to get up the next day.
I’ve nearly fallen asleep at work this week more than once.
It hasn’t helped that I’ve begun a huge project at work that’s pretty much consumed all of my time, including lunchtimes, for four days running. Today I finally broke the back of it, but it has reminded me that your brain uses more energy than any other part of your body. This afternoon the HR manager looked in on me, and remarked that I looked drawn.”Are you ok?”“I’m just tired”I’ve had similar conversations in the pastthey invariably come down to the same argument; I am the most experienced person at a number of things at work, and deadlines are deadlinesso if I can’t do something there’s little chance anybody else will be able to either help, or have a cat in hells chance of doing it any faster than I might. The end result of me doing something invariably looks better than most other people would achieve toowhich causes problems in itself. Once the higher powers learn that clients like your work, you get chosen to work on everything, or to save co-workers.
It’s worth mentioning something actually. Most of my skillset around “making things look good” has come from me either noodling around with web development projects at home, or doing freelance webdesign projects outside of work. The move towards thin client interfaces (read: intranets and extranets) over the last few years has meant I have a HUGE head start over all my colleagues. It’s never a question of “how on earth?”more a question of “do you want to do this the right way, or the horrible way you were going to?”.
It helps that I have worked on open source projects in the past, which instilled the idea of pride among your peers; that they will see what you build, and you should therefore aspire to make code as good as it can be. Not many commercial developers work to that edict. I’ll freely admit that I’m a bit of an idiot in that regardgiven a deadline, and the choice between doing something the right way, or the quick and crappy way, I will always put in the extra time and effort (usually unpaid). It’s the old argument about painting the other side of the fence (which apparently turns up in Steve Jobs biography tooone of his early life lessons)nobody can see the other side of the fence, but YOU know if you painted it or not.
Anyway. Let’s just agree on “I’m tired”.
While dealing with the kids single handed this weekend, I have to wash and iron all my work clothes ready to go away, and apparently do some baking with them. I’m thinking jam tarts would be an easy thing for them to makeespecially as we have ready made pastry in the fridge.
My project manager already informed me that we’ll be staying in an even bigger hotel this timequite how he’s getting away with it I’m not sure; a memo went around the company several months ago about saving money. I’m not going to complain though; if I’m being told to stay in a more expensive hotel by my manager, that’s totally his fault.
Must remember to call the credit card company this weekend too. My card got declined at the last hotel, even though it has a zero balance. Figure THAT one out.