I’ll be honest, I’ve been struggling this week. My boss has been out a couple of days for a well-deserved break, and as her designated emergency out-of-office reply contact, I’ve been putting out a few fires in between all the business case review meetings and getting awfully frustrated with the way that our re-alignment of work and priorities in our organization isn’t sticking with the rank-and-file.

I know this because I’ve got a foot each in leadership and grunt work, and I’m hearing all the bitching and moaning about stuff from the folks on the floor about stuff that I had a hand in shaping in the rarefied air of the office suite. Not that my fellow grunts are blaming me, necessarily; but it’s frustrating that our message isn’t getting through that this stuff we’re doing now is going to make future work so much damned less complicated. That they can’t see that is just kind of making me angry, or did for a while this week.

Mostly, I’m just sick of these business analysis memos: writing them, editing them, having meetings talking about them, tracking status on them, dreaming about them…ugh.

I’ve hit that wall…again. It’s kind of a different wall than the six month wall stuff I was on about last year around this time, but they certainly share some basic characteristics.

It’s that point in the year where I can see the relief of the holiday slow-down/break on the horizon, but can also see the piles of work that need to get done before that two switches to a three at the top of the calendar, and know from my quarter-century of experience that by this time next week, the people whose brains I need to pick to ensure that stuff gets done will start disappearing on use-or-lose leave.

About halfway through yesterday afternoon’s discussion of <<insert business topic here because I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter>>, I kind of hit my limit; my ability to summon the enthusiasm to carry on. I was done.

…an I’m not that much better this morning, but I shall do my best to carry on because I’m a goddamn professional, and I need to do the work to get the paycheck to ensure that the family can eat and stuff. That said, I’m probably not going to find much fulfillment in it.

When I started this post this morning, I thought I was going to close it out with a link to my dealing-with-the-pandemic song, “Walls,”, but it’s already there in the post I linked to a few paragraphs back (and I just ordered some fresh stock of the Blanket Fort Demos on physical CD, because I was out and y’know, marketing synergy), but I think I’m going to go with another one instead that better expresses my frustration, and also happens to be on the physical copies of Blanket Fort, but that I released as a quickie angry single back in 2020:

None of us want to be here, at least some of the time.