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deadline stress & childishness
Tuesday, January 12 1999
The deadline is the 18th of January. Before that time, ten or so major redesigns must be made to the website that is the basis for the company that employs me. If I get my part (and it's a substantial part) of this work done, I stand to get a good bonus package. But the it's almost inconceivable that I could really get all the work done. It stands around mocking me in several huge piles. What's happening is that I'm being asked to build powerful web applications over the course of a matter of days. It's discouraging, but I struggle away as best I can, since it's better than, say, being in bootcamp or jail.
Complicating matters are the many interruptions and distractions that pop up out of nowhere. Outside of work, there's my girlfriend Kim, who isn't one bit please when I come home late from work. But even at work, there is evidence of considerable insensitivity to my plight. Today, for example, the weekly company meeting was moved from the end of the day to 8:30am, prime working time. The idea was to have it at a time when minds are fresher and people aren't nodding off to sleep. But if I wasn't tired when I got there, it didn't take long before I felt my mental potential draining away. Enduring the same old Grand-Pooh-Bah-praising contributions made by the scrawny little sycophantic company accountant was bad enough, but then someone decided to give a report from Human Development, that early morning ritual in which the more complacent of my colleagues sit around listening to motivational tapes. When some of my engineering friends brought up their "challenges" with this meeting, that it was intruding on time they needed to complete deadline work and that it came at the most productive time of their day, these points were then debated in the usual long-winded "hey, listen to me talk" manner. It was depressing in an absurdly comic sort of way.
Then, in the evening, when I was in the midst of a rather complicated HTML table rearrangement (such work can be much harder than conventional ASP or Javascript programming), Dave and Jay were goofing off, relieving tension by playing a game of tagball right next to my workstation in the office. The sound of that ball repeatedly slamming into things only a few feet away set me on edge and made me extremely angry. But I just glowered and said nothing. Those guys are under as much stress as me and I knew they needed to work it off some way or another.
At night I was watching a fascinating show on Frontline about the society-destabilizing effects of current drug policy (everything from mandatory minimums to the widespread use of informants) when co-worker Eric gave me a call. He said that his former girlfriend Lucy, along with her new lesbian lover, had intentions of spending the night at his place. He didn't want to deal with them and wanted to know if he could come over and crash on my couch. I said sure, since Eric is always a fun houseguest.
So we sat around chatting about this and that. When Kim came home from her NIA class, she mostly enjoyed our conversation, although she couldn't stand it when we'd talk about office politics and the things that need to be done to improve company culture. Surprisingly, she actually said she liked hearing us talk about the more technical aspects of our work. "It's all right brain," she said, "since I have no idea what any of the words mean."
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