Looking back, it seems like I’ve been a bit negative this week. That may have been a by-product of some heavy pressure at work. One of our team is in the Army Reserve, and is being mobilized to go to Africa to assist in the Ebola fight over there. I’ve been assigned to drop what I’ve been doing and take up his workload, and we’ve had about two weeks to make the transition.
I certainly don’t mind, and I completely understand. I support our military, and I support sending them out to help relieve some of the suffering in the world. And this guy is a good guy. I appreciate his sacrifice. He’ll be away from his family for nine months, and he’ll have to miss his daughter’s high school graduation, among everything else. Staying here and picking up his work certainly seems the least I can do.
But that said, picking up his work has been stressful. It’s an entirely different part of the system we support, and my contact with it has been minimal thus far. There’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of messy edges. It’s not enough to just be able to do his work. There’s a lot of deeper understanding needed to be able to re-create his work. I began the two week countdown feeling like the fairy tale girl placed in a room full of straw and ordered to spin it into gold.
Fortunately I now feel like a farm girl placed in a room full of wool and told to spin it into thread. I understand the process involved, but I don’t have much experience with actually doing it yet. That will come. Unfortunately, it will come under fire. Our system roll-out continues apace, and they’re not going to slow down for li’l ol’ me. So yeah, even though I’m feeling okay about all of this, I’m still a little more stressed than usual.
But soon it’s the weekend! And so I leave you with, hopefully, a few things to make you smile.
Like the latest NFL Bad Lip Reading!
And a little Dr. Who parody:
Of Studio C’s “Breaking Bad” parody:
“I divided by zero.”