Short week and pretty decent long weekend (that provided a welcome distraction from other things) aside, I’m hitting a bit of a wall.

I actually started the week with a relatively positive attitude. I was ready to hit this special project I’m working hard and wrap things up so I can get back to my real job of building cool things. It was not to be. The universe simply kept throwing up roadblocks. Non-responsiveness (or worse, passive-aggressive deflection from certain quarters) to reasonable requests for information have kept me from ticking off milestones on the project schedule, and the project schedule itself has been difficult to get to, given that the office network has been just as unresponsive as the stakeholders; when it takes ten minutes for a simple SharePoint list to load and five minutes to launch Word thanks to everything being cloud-based now, not a whole lot’s getting done.

Watching the back-end guys having big “Oh Shit” meetings at the conference room down the hall to try and figure out what’s going on (not that any of that stuff is really managed locally anymore anyway) was not encouraging. When you’re reduced to re-writing work statements in basic text editors for later pasting into more feature-laden applications, you know things are not going well.

Add all this to the general sense of existential dread in the public sector (even with the five bullets thing finally going away), morale is low, and the three or four emails from the HR wellness folks (who are, surprisingly, still doing their thing) that came in overnight stressing the importance of mental health and the positive impact exercise has on it just had us wondering what the next thing coming down the pike would be.

That’s just what it’s like around the workspace these days.

This week-long rain isn’t helping either, as it’s keeping me off the bike and the trail. To maintain some sort of physical activity regimen, I made like a good senior citizen after work the other day and did a few laps around the mall along the route home from the office, though that place was just a different kind of sad, with it’s many closed storefronts and others filled with barely-functioning no-name t-shirt shops, fronts for local MLM representatives, and the saddest, most bored-looking retail workers you could imagine serving absolutely no one, because the only other people in the building were the half-a-dozen others doing the same thing I was.

That experience sparked a long-filed-away memory, so I did a quick search and found out that deadmalls dot com is still hanging on (or at least they’re still paying their hosting fees) from the early days of the internet in its late nineties glory, which is inspirational in its own sort of way.

So, I guess I’m going to do my best to try and take some solace in that little bit of positivity and stick-to-it-ness and do try to live up to that example, and see if it helps.