The One with the Last Week of Work

The year is almost done and what a year it was. I had a lot of plans that did not work out due to the pandemic. I did a lot of other stuff though.

I did not write as much here as I wanted to. I didn’t know what to write about. I started this year on a very positive note, then I got very scared about working from home all alone and then I realised that I can deal with this a lot better than I thought. But it was and is still tough. I would like to socialise more. I’m very confused about a lot of people’s actions during this pandemic. My work-life balance is very skewed right now. And that has led me to look a bit more negatively on things and I didn’t want to write about negative stuff too much. Because all in all, this year has been good.

The last few weeks and especially this one have been tough though. I forgot how hectic December always gets. People want to get things done before the end of the year or start planning the first big new thing for the next year. And I think it wouldn’t have affected me as much if I had been able to talk about this in the office during a quick coffee break every once in a while instead of sitting at home alone with my stressed-out thoughts. I did talk about things in calls a bit, but it’s just really different.

I managed to get through the last week by just fleeing from my normal work for most of the time. Monday would have been my sister’s 25th birthday and that day has been a bit shit since 2015. I realised fairly early in the morning that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate properly on the task I wanted to do, so I did a very long lunch break, called one of my team mates to discuss bathroom renovations and then asked my favourite coworker from my old team if I could just pair with him on whatever he was doing to get a bit of distraction.

We started in the afternoon on Monday, continued on Tuesday midday and then just went on until Friday, quite late in the evening. I participated in all the meetings we did (about the big new thing that does not have an early deadline but it kind of does, can you picture my eyes almost rolling out of my head?), I worked on my task a bit in the early morning hours and I went to our remote Christmas gathering yesterday for a while (not long though, I just didn’t feel like talking for once), but aside from that I spent all week in a sort-of pairing call with my ex-and-soon-to-be-again team mate.

I say sort of because he was changing the infrastructure logic of the one application that I never really managed to understand and that would take me days to set up on my computer again. We tried a LiveShare session today because he needed a quick break to eat a bit but it didn’t work so I really just looked at what he was doing through a screenshare call. I did help though. Mainly because the task was quite big and confusing and just saying “does that thing do the same as that thing?” or even “Huh???” when he returned something completely different from a factory made him very happy. It can be so easy sometimes.

I’m off work next week. I don’t know what I’m going to do (aside from cleaning my house that I have completely neglected due to my stress levels) but I’ll figure something out. I’ll definitely do some kind of retrospective / thinking about next year. I’ll be back at work on the 28th and 30th though (we have earned a day off by reaching some mile stone and it’s been set to the 29th, I guess to make people take the whole week off because it’s just a bit weird, but I don’t care) and aside from maybe finally finishing the task I should have been working on this week, I might write a bit about my thoughts on this year and the next year. We’ll see. If I don’t, Happy New Year to whoever manages to still find my blog posts!