I don’t want to dwell on it too much, but my hopes that the stress would dissipate after jury duty haven’t worked out so far.
There were videos a few years ago of Boston Dynamics testing their BigDog robot’s balance by shoving and kicking it while it was trying to walk. It would stumble and catch itself each time, but one couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the robot and frustration on its behalf. “This is how the robot uprising began,” some said.
Lately at work, I’ve felt kind of like that robot. Each time I’ve caught my balance and was making progress, someone would want something else.
The actual work isn’t horrible at all, don’t get me wrong. Some of it is outside my previous experience or perspective but nothing I can’t figure out eventually. It’s more the frequent interruptions and the general pile-on. The main thing I’m known for at work is getting debugging and coding tasks done quickly and efficiently, I haven’t been able to do because of a surfeit of meetings, support questions, more code reviews, etc. Just a lot of mental context switches eating up my bandwidth.
[Note from the future for anyone reading this later: this got resolved fairly quickly and things found a good rhythm. Part of it was me learning how to manage the time and balance things, part of it was the company working out how to deal with a transitional time. So I wound up editing this post down to whine less.]
I’ve booked time on an automated massage bed this afternoon. A fancy thing that scans your spine and does all kinds of massage techniques with heated rollers, which has been getting pretty good reviews. The place is less flaky than some of the other massage/sauna/float places around here — no paying $40 to sit in a room full of pink salt and breathe, no non-medically-necessary IV “therapy”, no cryo fat removal or whatever, just some far IR saunas and these massage robots. While it probably won’t do much for shoulders and neck, my back has been a mess for a while and maybe this will help reduce some tension and pain.
And in a month I’m going to take a few days to drive down to visit my parents, who I haven’t seen in ages. Hopefully that will be relaxing too.