The last week and a half in Going public

Only two more days of being on call!! Luckily nothing bad has happened, and no middle of the night incidents.

My boss was in town the end of the week before last through the middle of last week. It’s always nice to have him around and we have long and good chats. He brought his family with him this trip, as his wife is from this area, so they had other family to visit. I baked cupcakes one day and he brought his wife and kids in, so we had a little cupcake party.

Monday evening I did a bad thing and wiped a whole row from a database :( I felt really awful about it, and really stupid. I stayed up late trying to recover it, but it just wasn’t working out. Part of the data was stored in another place, so in the end I lost about 1/3 of it in total.

There were a few other crappy things that made the work week challenging. One is that an automated process I had created and then deleted was kicking off a regular stream of incident tickets, routed to another team. So this guy kept messaging me (on chat, not email) asking me to take them out of his queue (which I did, no problem). He said he may be able to help me fix the root cause, so I immediately messaged him back describing what was going on and he just ignored me. He messaged me a few more times for the same issue, and kept ignoring my follow up responses. A few days later, he said oh you should delete the process… something I had been telling him I did for several days! It’s so weird to me when people feel they are too important to read your words..!

In my attempt to fix this issue, I had to email a distribution group that contained 400-something people. Their help documentation told me to do so, but I was nervous about that regardless. I expanded the list so I could see if I could take any sub-groups off the email, in hopes of bothering fewer people. Finally, I send the email. Someone fixed my issue pretty quickly. Well, they fixed the issue, but the root cause was still a mystery and apparently no one cares. Anyway, a few minutes later some guy I don’t know emailed me and told me not to expand distribution groups when I send emails. I wrote back: “Good to know - I did not realize it made a difference.”, and this MFer sent me back THREE links of basically ‘how to use email’ documentation. Like damn, I already admitted I was wrong, why you gotta go a step further to be even more patronizing?? So demoralizing.

And speaking of demoralizing, I had a meeting with my boss’s boss, mostly about my promotion situation. Basically he said I’m doing a great job with my work, but I’m not getting enough recognition outside of my team because I’ve not collaborated with others. This is infuriating to me because I have been given ZERO opportunity to do so. I don’t even want to continue writing about this meeting because it’s just making me upset even thinking about it.

I was chatting with the other woman on my team (she lives in DC), and she mentioned how she was gone for a week a couple weeks ago. She said “oh they probably didn’t tell you why, but it was because my husband died.” I was like… W T F. I asked if he had been sick (he hadn’t), and apparently he was only 39. To make it worse, maybe a month ago I had chatted with this coworker and she told me she was pregnant. I think she is due in September or something. Back then she had told me she had a lot of miscarriages and had a lot of trouble getting pregnant. I can’t fucking believe she’s going to have to have that baby without a husband. I was seriously shook by this news for two days. She mentioned wanting to do a hackathon with me (a big company-wide event where you work on a special project of your choice for a few days), and that it would be a good distraction for her. She mentioned maybe even trying to get them to fly her out here for it. I’m gonna run with that and emotionally manipulate anyone I can to make that happen for her.

I have been mostly unsuccessful at slowing down my life. I ran a 5k race at work that I had signed up for. That exhausted me, but my friend was going through a break up of sorts, so I agreed to have a girls night with her and another girl because I can’t just abandon my friends in times of need. On Wednesday my other friend got into a minor car accident, so I picked her up from the tow truck place and brought her home. She wanted to get dinner with me so we did that, and then got some bubble tea. I hosted my last intern event on Friday. I bought a bunch of snacks, picked up interns from other buildings in our company, drove to the lake to go kayaking, and then drove some of them home. I can’t describe to you how badly I did not want to host that event, but I made it through. I did really enjoy the kayaking and am semi-inspired to buy a kayak of my own. I also signed up for another 5k race later this summer because I am dumb and can’t help myself (!?!?)

I went to the doctor last week too. He re-upped my meds, and looked into some hip/back pain I have been having ever since my surgery. He banned me from lifting weights for two weeks, and gave me targeted exercises to do. Sigh. He also looked at my throat and said it was looking like it’s healing perfectly. I am somewhat placated by that, but there’s another part of me that trusts no one and leaves me still feeling paranoid about my health.

This upcoming week is a short work week, but the holidays will not be relaxing at all. I have a couple friends coming into town from the bay area who are staying with me a couple nights. I’m also hosting a bbq on my rooftop on the 7th. Why do I do this to myself?