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Jun. 26th, 2006 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogMy upcoming vacation, just as the last one I had while with my current employer, is starting to become a source of anxiety for me. I am very much looking forward to it: I really need a break, especially if we may not be replacing our departing temp on a permanent basis (more on that later). However, it's coming right at the end of the quarter and I still haven't completed the projects I have on my list.
They're mostly done. Well, let's say mostly mostly done. I have better than ninety percent of my laptop upgrades done. I have documentation written for two out of the three things I was going to document. I'm a little behind on the inventorying I was supposed to be doing, but since that project was conjoined with with keeping my open tickets up to date and my close times down, things could be worse.
It may seem odd too interconnect two things as different as doing a physical equipment inventory and reducing open time of tickets. That's because it is. But, the management by objectives system that my company has embraced only allows for three "WIGs", or wildly important goals, per person per quarter. Therefore, since my manager has four things for me to do, she put two of them together and called it a WIG.
What that means for me is that even if the inventory does not come along well, I can still balance that out by keeping ticket open time down, which I think I've been doing. At least I get something out of being stuck with four projects for the price of three.
It's these projects that have been causing most of my work stress. I have too much to do there already, but I could get through that fairly well if it wasn't for the fact that I know I have these projects looming monolithically over me. Part of the incentive to get them done is that the completion of them is tied in to all of our quarterly bonuses, but more than that, I worry that I'm going to upset my manager by not having completed all of them.
I hate it when people are upset or disappointed in me. It's a singularly uncomfortable sensation, whether it's in a personal or professional capacity. I hate not living up to someone's expectations. Part of me feels like this is my fault. Maybe if I had taken all the five minute spans I've spent looking at Livejournal and such and strung them all together, I could have be done with all of this and wouldn't have to worry. But then I remind myself that the reason I take those mini-breaks is because I continually find myself working through lunch to get other things done. I think it all comes out even in the end.
I'll stop rambling. Yes, I have a lot of stuff to do. But I really need a vacation. A lot. And in three days, I'll be on one. And that will be good.
I'm looking forward to doing more of what I was doing on Sunday with my time off. I'm not looking forward to going down to Florida, largely due to the fact that I'm not. I'd have been scraping by pretty tightly as it was, and with the repair on the truck having eaten into my gas money, it's just not going to happen. (Oh, the truck? It was a corroded power cable that broke off before the starter. A new wire (combining with the tow to suck another $200 out of my pocket) resolved the issue. I wish I had had time to look at it myself and fix it; it wouldn't have been impossible to diagnose and not hard at all to fix. But with only one reliable vehicle, we just coudn't take the chance that I couldn't have done it.
What did Stormdog do on Sunday? He cleaned up! Not only that, he really enjoyed himself doing it. In lieu of that road trip I've been promising myself, I'm going to clean the entire house, top to bottom. (Well, maybe not the basement, but if you've seen our basement you'll know that that's understandable.) Having a clean dwelling is so lightening!
Sunday saw me doing maintenance on the computer room and some cleaning up in my bedroom. As well, I finally hung the curtain rod that Moira and I picked up at Ikea some months ago. We'd talked about using tapestries to divide the large central upstairs room of our house into two parts. One being a hallway that connects the stairs to the computer room and bathroom on one side and the library on the other, to the stairs in the middle. The other part, behind the curtain that will make up one long wall of the hallway, opposite the stairs, will be our bedroom. I don't have the full length tapestries yet (we'll probably pick them up at Bristol this year), but even with just the half-height bits of fabric I found to put on them, the division really does wonders to make the bedroom a cozier, and more private, space. It really makes me want to try doing more with curtains as room dividers and decoration.
I hung a few things on the wall in the computer room too. To the left of the interior of the door, even with the top of the doorframe, are two of my great-grandfather's award plaques that my grandfather gave me when we visited him over father's day weekend. Both are for his work in cement chemistry. One is the Leonard C Wason Medal for the most meritorious paper, and the other is an award of merit from the American Society for Testing and Materials granted for, among other things, "...dedicated commitment to the prinicple of voluntary standards in the cement industry." Ah, promotion of industry standards: this was my kind of engineer!
Below that is Moira's Golden Key National Honor Society plaque, looking quite a bit shinier and brighter with all of the dust wiped from it with a damp cloth. And below that is the award I got from Dave Kenzer and Steve Johansson for succesful completion of Cubicle Design 101 (Field Study) from back when I helped Kenzer and Company set up their offices. Well, it's actually made out to Dwarf and henchman, but I am the henchman.
Perhaps if I ever get around to framing my certifications I won't have quite so modest a showing on the honor wall as I do now, but somehow framing and hanging my own certs seems a little self-important. *shrugs*
As I write this, it's almost eight o' clock and I've only recently managed to leave work. Evil Bob was stuck late doing an emergency system build, so I was there along with him, which explains in part the verbosity of this post. I did manage to use the time to get some documentation done for the quarter end, and finish a system build of my own, so it wasn't a total loss. With that done, and with some luck, I'll even have time to spend some time Moira. She was wonderful enough to hold off on dinner for me, despite my objections, and I can't wait to get my paws on some of her nachos. I'm starving!
They're mostly done. Well, let's say mostly mostly done. I have better than ninety percent of my laptop upgrades done. I have documentation written for two out of the three things I was going to document. I'm a little behind on the inventorying I was supposed to be doing, but since that project was conjoined with with keeping my open tickets up to date and my close times down, things could be worse.
It may seem odd too interconnect two things as different as doing a physical equipment inventory and reducing open time of tickets. That's because it is. But, the management by objectives system that my company has embraced only allows for three "WIGs", or wildly important goals, per person per quarter. Therefore, since my manager has four things for me to do, she put two of them together and called it a WIG.
What that means for me is that even if the inventory does not come along well, I can still balance that out by keeping ticket open time down, which I think I've been doing. At least I get something out of being stuck with four projects for the price of three.
It's these projects that have been causing most of my work stress. I have too much to do there already, but I could get through that fairly well if it wasn't for the fact that I know I have these projects looming monolithically over me. Part of the incentive to get them done is that the completion of them is tied in to all of our quarterly bonuses, but more than that, I worry that I'm going to upset my manager by not having completed all of them.
I hate it when people are upset or disappointed in me. It's a singularly uncomfortable sensation, whether it's in a personal or professional capacity. I hate not living up to someone's expectations. Part of me feels like this is my fault. Maybe if I had taken all the five minute spans I've spent looking at Livejournal and such and strung them all together, I could have be done with all of this and wouldn't have to worry. But then I remind myself that the reason I take those mini-breaks is because I continually find myself working through lunch to get other things done. I think it all comes out even in the end.
I'll stop rambling. Yes, I have a lot of stuff to do. But I really need a vacation. A lot. And in three days, I'll be on one. And that will be good.
I'm looking forward to doing more of what I was doing on Sunday with my time off. I'm not looking forward to going down to Florida, largely due to the fact that I'm not. I'd have been scraping by pretty tightly as it was, and with the repair on the truck having eaten into my gas money, it's just not going to happen. (Oh, the truck? It was a corroded power cable that broke off before the starter. A new wire (combining with the tow to suck another $200 out of my pocket) resolved the issue. I wish I had had time to look at it myself and fix it; it wouldn't have been impossible to diagnose and not hard at all to fix. But with only one reliable vehicle, we just coudn't take the chance that I couldn't have done it.
What did Stormdog do on Sunday? He cleaned up! Not only that, he really enjoyed himself doing it. In lieu of that road trip I've been promising myself, I'm going to clean the entire house, top to bottom. (Well, maybe not the basement, but if you've seen our basement you'll know that that's understandable.) Having a clean dwelling is so lightening!
Sunday saw me doing maintenance on the computer room and some cleaning up in my bedroom. As well, I finally hung the curtain rod that Moira and I picked up at Ikea some months ago. We'd talked about using tapestries to divide the large central upstairs room of our house into two parts. One being a hallway that connects the stairs to the computer room and bathroom on one side and the library on the other, to the stairs in the middle. The other part, behind the curtain that will make up one long wall of the hallway, opposite the stairs, will be our bedroom. I don't have the full length tapestries yet (we'll probably pick them up at Bristol this year), but even with just the half-height bits of fabric I found to put on them, the division really does wonders to make the bedroom a cozier, and more private, space. It really makes me want to try doing more with curtains as room dividers and decoration.
I hung a few things on the wall in the computer room too. To the left of the interior of the door, even with the top of the doorframe, are two of my great-grandfather's award plaques that my grandfather gave me when we visited him over father's day weekend. Both are for his work in cement chemistry. One is the Leonard C Wason Medal for the most meritorious paper, and the other is an award of merit from the American Society for Testing and Materials granted for, among other things, "...dedicated commitment to the prinicple of voluntary standards in the cement industry." Ah, promotion of industry standards: this was my kind of engineer!
Below that is Moira's Golden Key National Honor Society plaque, looking quite a bit shinier and brighter with all of the dust wiped from it with a damp cloth. And below that is the award I got from Dave Kenzer and Steve Johansson for succesful completion of Cubicle Design 101 (Field Study) from back when I helped Kenzer and Company set up their offices. Well, it's actually made out to Dwarf and henchman, but I am the henchman.
Perhaps if I ever get around to framing my certifications I won't have quite so modest a showing on the honor wall as I do now, but somehow framing and hanging my own certs seems a little self-important. *shrugs*
As I write this, it's almost eight o' clock and I've only recently managed to leave work. Evil Bob was stuck late doing an emergency system build, so I was there along with him, which explains in part the verbosity of this post. I did manage to use the time to get some documentation done for the quarter end, and finish a system build of my own, so it wasn't a total loss. With that done, and with some luck, I'll even have time to spend some time Moira. She was wonderful enough to hold off on dinner for me, despite my objections, and I can't wait to get my paws on some of her nachos. I'm starving!
