like a start-up

Skip this one if you’re here for the dirty stuff. This is one in which I bitch about work and stress.

How did another fucking week get by me like this? It seems like yesterday I was saying, i’m off for sake bombs and then two blinks I’m back, and the list of things I need to get done is no shorter, in fact it’s longer.

I need a vacation, so very fucking badly. Hell, I needed to take a couple sick days this week (doctor’s orders – i got me a wicked sinus infection) but fuck it, I’ve no time to be sick.

I’m counting days til I get a break; 18. I head to anaheim for an all-too-short family trip to see The Mouse. But while that’s good for the soul, it’s not rest; four days of mad rush and then back at work.

My real vacation isn’t til august, and even that is still in a state of flux due to some scheduling difficulties. If I’m lucky though, I’ll be under water in about a hundred and twenty days.

Ignore me while I grumble. This shit ain’t as easy as when I was 25. This is why i didn’t move to a startup company six, almost seven years ago when I left Cisco. I had offers; I had several offers. But I had a moment of clarity, and though, sure the big money, maybe, if the dice land right, but what else? And I thought about my first run in a start-up where home was a memory, a place I showed up at to sleep and shower, where life was what I did at work, not the other way around. And I turned down an offer or two and took a job in a big corporation.

This last month it’s like I’m on one of those shops, where we are in push mode all the time, short handed and long-houred; and we don’t even see when the light at the end of the tunnel is, we don’t know when the ramp stops going up. It’s that kind of push, we’re in uncharted waters here. The schedule tells us nothing, because for my team, the work is setup, support, methodology. And we don’t know what is going to explode around which corner yet.

We’re makin’ this up as we fuckin’ go, y’know?

I had a conversation with a co-worker the other day; one of those relaxed, happy, eternally competent people who almost never gets riled, who never complains even when he has to work long house (ie, nothing like me), and he remarked, this is getting really tense, you know? Stress is getting to everyone. And I said yes, and dude, it’s going to get worse.

To be sure, I’m actually into what I’m working on, which hasn’t always been true the last two years. My days are winging by and I’m doing work I’m good at (i’m at my best at the bleeding edge). This isn’t misery I’m talkin’ about. But damn, I’m tired.