Work

Work.. that's the magic word lately. Everywhere I look, someone's talking about how much work they have. My friend, S, has been swamped lately. She's been working until all hours of the night and stressed with having to deal w/ a crappy project manager and incompetent consultants. Pobresita.

We have also been swamped at work since we're in the midst of a huge web re-engineering project. My manager's been putting in a crap-load of hours on it. Late night calls testing printouts to the client in Japan, db back-up and restores a million times over, canceled vacations. The list goes on and on and it seems that whenever something goes wrong, it inevitably falls on his lap. I try and help out where I can, but it's been getting to me too. These consultants - though they're nice guys - are a pain in the ass! Their requests are becoming more and more demanding and we have to cater to them like WE work for THEM. And even though H & M have put in work to the project, most of these requests go to my manager or myself. That wouldn't even be so bad if it's the only thing we were working on. A lot of people have the luxury of working on one project and then going on to the next project. Not so for us. It seems like every IT related project goes through our Network group at some point so we get dragged in a million different directions at a time. The best is when someone from one of the project keeps asking for your status and you really don't have anything to tell them because you just haven't had the time to work on it.

I've learned, however, that no matter how bad you have it, you'll always find someone who has it worse than you. I was talking to one of the Indian consultants at work and he was at the brink of cracking up. He was telling me how he's been working until 11pm or later for the past 2 weeks and how his wife is mad at him and doesn't understand the pressures at work. He had planned to take his mother-in-law (who's visiting from India) on a trip to Niagara Falls last weekend but had to cancel it for work. So I'm sure that didn't go over too well w/ his wife. This man was on the verge of breaking into tears as he was telling me this. Thank God he didn't start crying. I don't know how to act in front of a crying man!

So, yeah, work has been a bitch lately but I don't have it so bad in comparison to him. Plus, I'm on a 100-day plan right now. Basically, ever since I got back from Florida, my plan has been to push myself harder than ever for the next 100 days. It's not like I'm going to coast afterwards, that's not my style, but the idea is that during these 100-days, I'm going to just go all out in everything I do. "I don't sleep, cuz sleep is the cousin of death."