Drudgery

Well, currently, my job is no fun 😦

It’s a peculiarity of my life that, at any given point, some aspect of my existence will be a squeaky wheel – job, training, health, family, finances, recreation, church or the Fellowship; one of them will seem out of kilter.

It’s more likely that I simply have a magic magnifying mind that casts about to find the one thing that it wants to focus on as being cause for unhappiness. Right now, my training is going as well as can be expected, the wife and I are living like kittens, meetings and church are a blast, we’re getting close to ski season, I’ve got more money than I ever expected to have – and, oh yeah, the Crimson Tide are 6-0.

And I live in Whitefish, Montana, so – there’s that 🙂

So it must be the job that’s out of whack 🙂

Now, let’s be clear – I work for a great company – just how great cannot be overstated. And I work with great folks – there’s no dead weight or grumpiness at Workday, unless it’s me.

When I say the “job” is out of whack, I mean my job, specifically – and the way that I am doing, and HOW I am doing, at that job. I got myself into a project that is painful and slow. It was my own nosiness that brought the project about; I happened to notice some technical debt, some refactoring that seemed necessary, and I created a Jira to point it out.  “When you’re warm and happy in a pile of poop, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT“. Then my overconfidence caused me to agree to take the project on.

Hubris, ate, nemesis.

Now, to be sure, I was already the dumbest guy in the room before I took this project on; Workday is full of extremely smart, happy, productive people.

(I’ve been thinking about when I took this job – when I cleared away the stuff I wasn’t interested in, there were still three offers on the table. In one of them, I would walk in as a star; I not only aced the interview, but I showed them that there were things in their interview materials that they weren’t aware of. In another, I would have come in as a guy who would have been a good, average contributor once I came up to speed.

Instead, I took the job with the wildest bleeding-edge technology and the most hyped-up, hardworking, happiest workforce – shoulda known I’d wind up in the back of the pack 🙂

So being the dumbest guy in the room, I should have said “Gee, that’s a problem” and let somebody else take the lead. Did I do that? Noooooo!…and ever since, my life has been an increasingly miserable mess. And I’ve become acutely aware that I am not earning my salary at my present rate of productivity; that really eats my lunch.

So MY plan for fixing this problem is simple – quit. I should quit, and lay around the house and be a househusband, and take care of everything else in our lives, leaving Ethel nothing to do but her job (which is going swimmingly, by the way).  We’ve got plenty of money – sure, as long as I’m working, we have MORE money, which no doubt gives us a better lifestyle long-term, but let’s tell the truth and shame the Devil – I’m not going to alive much longer. My telomeres are a mess; my chromosomes are out to kill me. Plus, the Yellowstone volcano is gonna blow any minute, and where will my IRA be THEN?

But Ethel says no – she’s so mean and selfish.

So I’ll try to get the current changeset pushed into our codebase, and then maybe get the next-to-the-last (of some fifteen) Jiras out of the way, and hope that the next thing that comes down the pike doesn’t leave me frustrated and helpless to the point of despair.

Who knows? Maybe my job will take a big upswing, and I’ll be on top of things, and feel productive again!

…just in time to get injured and miss the Ironman. Or have my church go crazy (it happened in the early 2000s). Or we won’t get any snow 🙂 “Rozanne Rozanna Danna, it’s always sumpthin’…” 🙂