The Beast At Bay

Well, it has been a bit of a chaotic week.  Here at work my boss and several additional team members are all on vacation, which they needed and deserved. But, when other people are on vacation, whoever remains in the office ends up catching things that they normally wouldn’t have to deal with.  Most of this stuff is incident - it really doesn’t have anything to do with anything. 

In any work environment there are a lot of “lazy questions” that make the rounds.  A lazy question is where, when someone has a question, rather than seeking the answer to the question they seek a person they can pass the question off too.  One of the ways you learn to deal with this deflecting behavior is too simply and honestly respond with three words.  “I don’t know.”  I often joke that most companies don’t know how to deal with the answer of “I don’t know”, so the overall impact on a system can be pretty amusing.

To my own surprise I’ve made a bit of headway during the week. I had previously anticipated that the entire weekend would be a loss, more or less, but it slowed down yesterday afternoon. I managed to get a few things off the list.  I am still behind the eight ball, but I think description covers pretty much everyone I know here at the Evil Company, at least in our extended group.  We seem to struggle with some of the very basic things. I think a lot of that struggle originates in our lack of process discipline, but that is my interpretation and may not be shared by other people.

However, tomorrow is the 4th of July, and then I will be back to work Friday, but that will be an exceptionally slow day (knocking on wood as I say that).  Then the weekend, then four days of work - and two blessed weeks of vacation.  I am almost desperately hoping that I manage to get a clean break when it comes to vacation - it has been a long time since I have had a clean break and a vacation for myself.  I think that is one of the areas of this job that I consider to be high cost - the constant pressure to allow the working world to move into and take over your personal time.  It’s a daily or weekly struggle to hold that particular beast at bay.