Happy Fun Cog

• This week, in my weekly one-on-one with my manager (said meetings are more or less a standard practice in the company I work for) my boss told me in a very nice way that I needed to not get stressed out about things as much as I do and to have faith that things would work out in the end. It's a very fair point for her to make; I treat many things at work as if they were going to be looked at as a summary of my value as a person and an employee. I really do need to take a step back and take a deep breath. But it's so hard to do that. I know it's the right thing to do, but it's just so hard for me to be relaxed about things.
• I was thinking tonight about how, on the one hand, it bothers me that I don't have much of a social life outside of my girlfriend. On the other hand, I find that there's so much that I want to do or need to do with my time (reading, writing, tae kwon do, etc.) that the time I spend with my girlfriend is the only social time I can spare. Then I realized that that's probably exactly how my father feels about things, given his devotion to reading and his job. I've spent most of my adult life looking at my father in a judgmental way, and now I see a connection between that and my own persistent sense of self-criticism/loathing. I think that if I could feel more compassion and forgiveness towards my father, and indeed towards most people, then I could feel that for myself as well. Or I could just be a miserable, judgmental bastard for the rest of my life. Either way.
  

As I've mentioned in recent posts, I've been working really hard lately, pulling 12 hour days and going to the office on weekends. It finally caught up with me and, as of yesterday, I officially have a nasty case of viral pink eye that requires eye ointment 3 times a day and two oral doses of antibiotics (it's not just a virus; there are complications involving pustules that we shan't go into).

Because of this, I had to tell my boss that I could not make a planned business trip to Phoenix on Sunday. Besides the medical and comfort problems inherent in getting on a plane with pink eye, I didn't want to be interacting with the software users when my eyes are so swollen and gross that it looks like somebody punched me repeatedly in the eyes with gloves made of snot.

My boss then assigned one of my co-workers to take my place. I felt, and still feel, horribly guilty. It doesn't matter that it's totally logical for me to cancel my travel plans, nor does it matter that the only reason I have pink eye is because of work-related stress (this happens to me once every 1-2 years; it's always stress related), NOR does it matter that even with pink eye I was working until 10 PM last night. Nothing matters except for the fact that I feel horribly guilty about not being able to fulfill every work-related obligation that is put in front of me.

I can see how ridiculous it is to feel guilty, yet if it weren't for the urging of my girlfriend, I probably would've gotten on the plane to make that business trip no matter how much pain I was in. I always seem to bounce between feeling horribly guilty for not being the perfect employee and feeling resentful about the pressure that I always feel to do my best.

In short, I'm kind of stubborn and prone to guilt and I'm glad that I have people in my life who give me good advice.

The past few weeks at work have been very difficult for me. I've been working on an upgrade of a software that one of our finance groups uses, and it was a high visibility upgrade that had to be done before the end of last week since the company had to start compiling and presenting its numbers for Q1 (I work for a medium-sized corporation that is publicly traded so Wall Street's happiness with us is important).

Then, starting on Thursday, we had a major problem with a different piece of financial software. This one I was not very familiar with as I inherited it last year from someone else who didn't document much of the work he'd done on it over the past few years. The application is usually very stable which, ironically, made it that much harder to fix the problem since I'd had so little experience troubleshooting it.

These two pieces of software are similar in a number of ways: they very important to the financial processes of our company, they are (subsequently) the focal point of my fear and loathing, and they are supported by a staff composed mostly of people who are not native English speakers and often live in other countries. The case of the financial software that stopped working these past few days stands out in my mind in particular (probably because I also just spent most of my Saturday working on it).

Because of that software, I found myself at one point working late in an office in Massachusetts on Thursday night, frazzled and overwhelmed by anxiety. I was also lonely because I hadn't seen my girlfriend all week. We were had planned to see each other that night (she'd just returned from a business trip) but my personal life was now on hold until this problem could be fixed.

My lifeline in that dark night was an immigrant working on the West Coast of the US and a woman in India. We spent hours on the phone as they walked me through different processes, all to no avail. I was irritated and over-caffeinated and totally reliant on these women since I had no relevant experience with the software and the one person in my company who knew the software was out of the office.

It was an interesting experience. On the one hand, I had a hard time understanding their accents and having to ask them to repeat themselves time and time again was driving me mad. On the other hand, there was something, well, comforting about being in such a scary situation and feeling alone and yet also feeling connected to these people from different cultures and countries by phone and computer.