overextended - Tuesday November 23 1999    

At work I feel a terrible need to clone myself. I've taken on far too many projects simply because there's no one else who has the particular skillset and programming style necessary to handle the recent tide of demands. Though it's clearly more than I can do, saying no doesn't seem to work, especially given the relentlessness of the E-commerce team. I'm getting so stressed out that once again I've been fantasizing about just getting up and walking out, never to return. That would show those E-commerce fuckers! (It's important to note that under the new management system it's not bosses driving me these days, but peers, often people of equal and even lesser status.)

That said, I actually like the skills this crushing demand for my work is forcing me to master. These skills are all about building complex things as reliably as possible in as little time as possible. It's all about little tricks of finger sequence and subtleties of cut & paste, along with trickier things like quickie scripts and other automation techniques.

Today I had an added complication resulting from the fact that a crucial graphics designer is actually located in Austin, without access to our local network. The solution (suggested by the ever-so-schoolmarmish VP of IT) was to have the Austin designer put her data in an Excel spreadsheet, which I then read into a SQL database using a quickie ASP-based migration script.