Back in the box
Vacation over, much too quickly.
Wish it lasted longer. Being able to sleep in until noon. Going out with friends for coffee or dinner. Just being able to sit and spend an evening with a good friend, without having my cellphone go off every two hours. For the first time in my life in a long, long time, I stayed away from the computer for more than eight hours at a time, and it felt good to ignore the incessant emails screaming "URGENT!!" and "ASAP!!" and "WHERE ARE YOU WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY THE BUTTONS ON THE WEB PAGE ARE THE WRONG SHADE OF BLUE".
Back to reality and I am back in my room, churning out code and bug fixes ten to sixteen hours per day. My actionables list is getting longer each day, when they expect you to produce three new features in one week (despite your telling them that each new software feature will take two weeks to code and another week to test).
Back in the box. My family doesn’t really understand what I do in my room all day and night, all they know is that I stay in my room, do strange computer stuff and am on the phone all the time, and every two weeks a check comes in the mail.
So. I have not been happy with my job for a long time now, but I haven’t been getting any responses from any of my other job applications. I do get calls from headhunters from time to time, but there’s never any response after I send them an updated resume, which leads me to believe they’re just calling me to pad out their list of applicants.
I wish I could say my life was going in circles, at least I’d be moving. Right now it’s at a dead stop. No change, no improvement. I used to have a pretty good work ethic (I kept getting compliments on that all the time from my boss) but I can feel even that draining away. It’s hard to stay motivated when you know that three months down the line they’re gonna throw out this version of the software and ask for a near-complete rewrite.
It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re staring an unreasonable deadline in the face and it’s five AM, you haven’t slept in two days, and you know you’re not gonna finish it in time for the scheduled test in four hours.
I did finally make a decision, as the plane’s wheels touched down on the SFO runway. I will look for something else to do.
Whatever it is, it won’t be with this company. I am looking for another job. I am sending out applications to graduate schools. I am steeling myself for the inevitable few months of unemployment.
And it doesn’t scare me as much now. Not as much as two years ago.
Early Monday morning, and I’d normally hate Mondays, except that when every day is like the next, you tend to hate all the days of the week equally.
This is the sixth sunrise in a row I am watching, and I am comforting myself by telling myself I just need to hang on for a month or two. Just a little longer.