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A couple of weeks

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a pretty interesting life. I have been to several parties, I have been out a couple times with friends and I’ve had some decent weekends – just have them blown away by Monday morning.

Sound familiar? I had the same complaint about my last job. Let’s just say that the honeymoon is over, the kid gloves have come off and all the real problems are starting. There are 4 of us in my ‘team’ that deal with network problems and servers. We recently inherited a few systems that have fallen apart, which has made our lives oh so fulfilled… trust me.

It wouldn’t bother me if it had sort of crept up on us but all of them blind-sided us and we had to scramble to learn the business model for the servers and their function in the whole scheme of things. Meanwhile, everyone is staring at us thinking we’re the experts (which we are, I mean – c’mon) but at that moment we look pretty stupid.

We’re just now getting to the point where things are starting to stabilize. Except for me. One of my duties is to maintain our backups. Without touching them, they breakdown. No changes made means something goes wrong. I don’t understand what the deal is and then work very hard to correct the problem but it’s like an archaeologist changing society – everything runs so s-l-o-w-l-y. Ugh. No respite from the stress.

Then my favorite: I tell my boss about a problem. He shoots back an e-mail, “how do you want to solve the problem?” I don’t have an answer right off but research a good response. I ask the other guys in my team. I finally report back with my plan. “This is how we’re going to go about it”. So my boss promptly walks up to me and says “No, don’t do it that way – do it this way”. (sigh…)

So it’s not all days of wine and roses. Momma told me there’d be days like this. The boss is on vacation this week so a lot of the stress is gone but there’s still a lot of internal stress.

People keep telling me I need to take some time off. Maybe they’re right.

You know, stress is a funny thing. It can zap your energy worse than a hot day. It can cause all kinds of physical ailments but it’s all mental. You cannot point at something and say “ah, ha – that’s stress” like it’s a building brick or shoelace. You just know it’s there.

To top it off – my heat is out again. I couldn’t tell because we’ve had a real warm stretch recently. Tonight when I got home I felt like it was cold enough for the heat to come on and it just didn’t. I think it may be time to replace the HVAC unit I’ve got. Probably be better in the long run.

To end on a happy (?) note: I was looking around on the interweb and came across a site that showed information about your home – basically, how much your house is worth. The best part is they show you as well as all your neighbors. Anyhow, when I looked at my street – my house was appraised at the highest value. I thought that was pretty cool.

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