I can’t sleep. I’ve tossed and turned for nearly two hours, but for some reason I just can’t quiet my mind enough to fall asleep. Plus I have a headache. Plus, I have to be up in 5 hoursto go to my meaningless meeting so a bunch of Indians can piss and moan because I didn’t get to answer their emails last week while I was killing myself to reach an arbitrary deadline set by a lame-duck team lead.
I halfway think they should require us all to write blogs about what we’re actually doing, what actually works with our software and what doesn’t, and what we really thing. There is an INCREDIBLE amount of out-and-out lying that goes on in the corporate world, and the pallative vent of blogging can at least lend some perspective.
So, the story about why I’m losing sleep over something so trivial as work:
It’s been a year-long slog through a design and development of this new software thingamabobber. It’s your classic designed-by-committee, ivory-tower thing, full of good intentions, but probably worse than useless. It moved from being a research topic to a full-blown “business-gotta-have-it” thing before we even had a prototype. Egos got bruised. Politics became heated.
Essentially, my current insomnia and foreboding is my pennance for not killing the thing. I had the power and political capital to do it, but the groupthink that invades the corporate world invaded me to, and so I let it slide on pure ‘status quo’.
So, after a year of weekly meetings, not much progress, grandstanding, etc., we’re down to implementing the thing, and it’s a death march within a death march. In addition to what would be a crushing load from my normal project, I’m now the guy who gets to ‘make it work’ on this white elephant.
I hate it. It’s soured me on my current project, and it’s damn near soured me on my whole profession. From the underlings who are insubortinate, to the team leads who lead inconsitently, to the hands-off managers who just couldn’t give a shit, I hate the lot of them. I get to deal with this same crap from now until I die. This does not make me happy.
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I tried my best throughout this long weekend (I consider any weekend where I don’t work a long weekend) to forget about work. But it’s nagging at me constantly, reminding me of responsibilities unmet, expectations unfulfilled, and just how much aggrivation work is going to be for the forseeable future.
Honestly, I just wanna bail and make a fresh start somewhere else. It scares the hell out of me, but I’ve realized every project I do will be a retread of this (the last 4 have been!), just because of the culture where I work. There are monetary rewards, but nothing is worth working the way I have for the past two weeks: Little sleep, no exercise, poor diet, irritability. Good Lord, I wanted to kill my girlfriend for ‘camping out’ on a parking space at Meijer today, for Heaven’s Sake!
So anyway, my innate desire to make things is waning. At this point, I’d settle for a decent job I could make a living at, that I could do very well from 8-5pm and then have time for my family. I dont’ want my kids not knowing their father. Also, i’d like to live long enough to have kids.