The Job

I don't know if I've ever been as close to just walking out on my job as I was this week. That includes my time at IBM. At IBM, I wasn't happy with management, but I was willing to take the money as long as they were willing to pay me. This is not the case this week.

This week, I was so overworked that I literally couldn't think. I found myself making mistakes in the most simple tasks, not noticing it until days later, and those mistakes caused me even more work and worry.

I am not in a job where work can wait or be done after hours. The stuff I do must be done during a window of time, and if there's too much to do, you can't stay late and do it - it's gotta be done now or never.

I travelled for 2 days this week. The first trip was a day trip to Atlanta, and it went well - I straightened out a problem at two stores. The second day was to Tennessee, and the power supply for the PC I brought was missing - I never checked before I shipped it. We had to ship a new one overnight and I made do with my laptop to train the contractor I met there.

This left 3 days to do a week's worth of work, and the contractor was calling me at night while he did two more installs. I got woken up at 2 am at least twice in those 3 days due to cell phone calls. Add in the stress of the mistakes I made due to mental fatigue, and I think I might have fired myself if I had been the boss. I couldn't remember things that I had done an hour ago. And then the weekend on-call schedule comes out and I have to be on call this weekend. Wonderful.

It's time to take some time off.