All I managed was 10 posts in a month of 30 days . . but what a month it has been .. one I am unlikely to forget in a long long time!
The month did not just continue as it had begun it progressively got worse. There was not a single weekend that I did not work through .. and most days were till midnight. It was worse with slipping deadlines and unbelievable pressure on the getting the deliverables to the project team. To make matters worse, I have recently been given some new responsibility (someone's left and its stop gap till a new person joins) and I know very little about the area. There's been no time to meet people around the business and in all this chaos there was a report due on some issues in this business for which I was trying to get inputs from people around the business, but I did not get a single reply in time and I knew too little to put together by myself. It doesn't end here .. unrelated to my work .. there's been lots of chaos at B's workplace and threat of mass redundancy. In all this I had my annual review and it was only lukewarm, heavily influenced by how much behind schedule I am on the current project (its irrelevant that most of it has been because of things pretty much out of my control).
All this just built up and up and up .. till one Friday in a meeting with my boss I totally broke down. Not only was it super embarrassing . . it comes across as quite professional. I had felt it coming but I was just rushing from one meeting to another that day and really wanted to take a break before this one to just get away and breathe .. but no time for that .. and it happened even though I tried quite hard to avoid it. Poor guy pretty much freaked.. he obviously knew how much stress there had been with everything (though not about my personal problems) so I tried to blame it on that and hope that it is not something that gets attached as a label to me (though at that point in time ofcourse I wasn't worrying so much about career progression and labels!). After the waterworks were under control .. he stayed late and helped with some of the work. Needless to say that the weekend after this was spent slaving at work and getting some of my overdue work out. The work is finally under control with all the overdue stuff completed for now .. B's workplace did have the mass redundancy and we've gone through the whole roller coaster of emotions on it.. and issues around sorting out my own work permit. And now I am just so tired . . and also so relieved not to have any work on this weekend. Am pretty sure by the next one it'll be quite different.
Lots of lessons for me! For one, I have become more organized about my work .. and it helped my spirits that my boss was finally pretty happy with the results of the project/presentation. It helps that there are no immediate financial issues and in a melodramatic way I think this is not a big issue given we're all healthy and happy! Most important lesson though .. I now recognize that 'stress' is a pretty real issue. I never gave the idea of stress much importance.. I always equated it to some work pressure .. next time I will surely be a little more respectful about the build up of this extra pressure!
A pretty action packed month and pretty ironical. When I was thinking of year end I had written that this was pretty much it as far as 2007 goes since nothing much would happen in the last two and a half months .. and then deleted it thinking I should not be speaking too soon. ESP :) ?!
