Water Delivers

It is amazing what water, food, and rest will do to a person in just a couple of days. Last week left me burned crisp and insane but despite the broken XBOX controller and the related small holes in the wall, I'm feeling better. Tomorrow I start a new job and I can say that I am as ready as I ever would be. I have even ironed some clothes.

Hands Gagged Mouth Tied

So, I made a list of things to try with new people as well as a list of things to just try. Knowing this would be a holiday weekend, I made multiple plans and they all have flopped. It was a bad week anyway.

I'm trying to move on without the marriage and without really depending on anyone else for doing so but I must be hexed. The haunt of the marriage will never go away it seems. For months, I've been trying to get stuff done to close out the settlement and put the divorce to rest but I am damned.

I can't renew the license to my car because of him, I can't get MY name off joint checking accounts because of him, I can't find my belongings because of him, etc. This week I've argued with the license bureau, the bank, the government and I've lost them all because they won't let me do anything withOUT HIM. Do these things matter to him? As always, he is too busy to be available for comment so the answer is "No."

Weakest Linked

My brain woke me up this morning. It was shivering so fast that, at first, I thought there was an earthquake but later dismissed it as panic. For the two previous mornings, my heart woke me up with an arrhythmia that I was afraid would not get back into normal mode. I assume that was panic as well.

I suppose today was the worst. With little sleep and not much food to keep down, I've had to take two heart pills and a couple of Klonopin. I have not taken Klonopin during the day for a long time.

Last night as I lay in bed, all the fear hurricaned my thoughts around in my head. I knew that it would be better to get out of bed and take some sort of action but I seemed frozen there with exhaustion.

I kept wondering how much more change I can take without shattering beyond repair. Change is the only constant in life and this I know; but ... I can't accept it anymore ... it has simply become unacceptable.

All this and I start a new job next week. It is a high-risk job so I fear I will not succeed. After working ten-hour days the past couple of weeks I am burned dry with nothing left. I am probably catastrophizing by envisioning myself as homeless or as having a stroke and being rendered unable to care for myself with no one to care for me ... and no money.

Somehow, I've got to pull it together over this weekend. When I finally got to eat lunch today at 3PM in the afternoon, all I could do was giggle because I had accidentally knocked the waitress's tablet under the table and she could not find it. Due to my stifled giggling, I could not tell her where it was.

The giggling has been happening allot lately as well. Others find it entertaining but I am not amused by it. I get tired just thinking about it. I have never been diagnosed as Bipolar but I am sure it is some sort of mania ... perhaps from fatigue or perhaps from too much coffee and sugar.

Today I was driving through a parking lot when I saw a girl walking right into the path of my car. I slowed to a stop and sat there watching as she walked INTO the front of my car. She kind of bumped her knees and just continued on her way. All I could wonder was if some toxin is in the air making us all insane. I don't know.

Pulling 70+ -- An Addendum

As a follow-up to what I wrote here (where I was complaining about my job), I don't want to sound inconsiderate to those who would love to be overworked. While my complaints are valid, I am not insensitive to the current number of unemployed people who are going through very frightening times right now. I am grateful, for now, to have a job but I am aware that it could end at any moment.

Pulling 70+

... So another company had offered me a position 2 or 3 times over the past month but I turned them down because it did not seem to be a stable company. But, last weekend, my management staff got into it with the CEO so that yesterday we were told that we are to work mandatory 10-hr days (at least ), 7 days a week, for the next 60 days or as long as it takes. We are to report our progress in the morning and then every evening. Anyone not regularly meeting their goals will be shipped out at the end. If none of us can meet our goals then the software development work will be contracted out to a firm (in INDIA !). It is beyond me how he thinks he can get ANY firm (who does not know the product!) a set of requirements as to what the customer wants if he cannot get it to his own developers so I only assume he was blowing steam.

Regardless, for quite some time now I have spent anywhere from 5 - 20 hours a week WAITING on a bottle-necked co-worker and other management to get work to me. I've even offered to do the business part for them just to get the process moving but no one had been concerned ... until now ... when I have to make up for their screw-ups with 70+ hour weeks.

The company that is pursuing me raised the offer in salary and I took it. I do not know what will happen. I actually really do like it here but it is so crazy that if they do not get their software development process under control then I do not see how they can pay me at all. It does not help that our main bottle-neck is a very angry man who rips into the rest of us on such a regular basis that I did not realize how little confidence I have left until I seriously considered changing over. I'm not sure I can even pull any weight at another company.

I've gotten very little in the way of documentation about what it is I am supposed to code. This week Mr. BottleNeck got so angry at me that he grabbed my notebook and started yelling and writing instructions about who-knows-what. I was glad to get something on paper but then he walked out the door ranting and took the darn notebook!

Since I changed careers years ago, I have been grateful to be in a field where employees are in demand but software development everywhere seems to be a large hole-in-the-pocket. No one can get the process to work and money bleeds all over the place. People think we have a high salary but they do not compare the salary / hours-worked ratio. I don't know very many people in this field who do NOT have some type of cardiovascular disease and many work 70-hour-weeks in sweat-shops as the NORM. All this and our jobs still get shipped overseas. They claim we can't develop but it is management who can't manage. Honestly, I think software developers in the US need a union.

It is possible that I missed something somewhere -- that I did not do something I should have or did something that I should not have -- but ... I can't imagine what. I am more sorry than anyone that I am too slow. Here I am and this is where I am.

I do not know what people see when they look at me but I know that it is not what I used to think. There is no way they can see that this is a prison or what put me here. I do not know how anyone could even imagine so how could I have thought that they did. I am aware that other people are brave and go on. There is nothing I can say to that. I have no dispute to voice. If I fall then I have no place to get back up to.