Wednesday, November 28, 2012

60 Email on the Transsiberian

I spent the evening watching the movie "Transsiberian" with Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, and Ben Kingsley while I was working my way through my email backlog.  I managed to read, delete, sort and respond to about sixty email this evening, which made for a long, but mostly productive workday.

The movie was pretty good, it's a film noir set on the Transsiberian railway in Russia.  It is dark, intense, and well acted.  I'd recommend it if you haven't seen it. Emily Mortimer is very powerful in the film.

Work was long today, so I won't dwell on that - another day ahead of me.  The project is struggling and people are coming apart at the seams.  Yet another sign of bad management - a well managed team pulls together when it comes under stress, a poorly managed team falls apart.  It's amusing to me that part of our team is pulling together (the part under my direct manager), while the rest of it has started to fall apart.

My main concern is that the whole thing is going to implode and innocent people are going to catch the blame for our incompetent director, whose already casting about for ways to blame the problems on other people.  Dang, it is tough being under bad management.

It's been a stressful fall, that is for sure.  I wanted to go back to South Dakota for Christmas, but I am going to postpone that trip. All that is going to do is ratchet my stress level even higher - trying to travel in that most challenging season.  Running full speed up to Christmas, then stressful travel, then coming back to work and hitting it at full speed. That would definitely take all of the fun out of the vacation.  I think I will sit tight and aim at a more leisurely vacation after the holiday, somewhere in the early spring.  It would be nice to get two weeks or more completely off the work grid.

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