Oh, shit!

Every company -- hell, every department within a company -- has an "oh, shit!" person. The person that gets all the last-minute projects, the projects with a suddenly changed and really close due date, the person who can work under the stress and strain of a suddenly changing working environment and still produce good work.

I am that guy at work, currently. The manager thinks nothing of telling me to drop everything and work on something "quick and dirty" or to assign to me the task that slipped through everyone's fingers and is suddenly due in a day, a few days, or a week.

His willingness to do this tells me that he has confidence in my abilities, shows respect to what I can do and have accomplished for him, and trust in me to learn what needs to be done and do it right on short notice.

However, the fact that lately all I have worked on are these types of projects can lead to quick burnout. Right now, everything I am working on is last-minute, short time frame projects. This leads to a lot of excitement, over time, and stress as I am given each project, work it, and complete it. It means I have to change my daily routine to accommodate sudden changes in the project's dynamics and due dates, which can lead to poor eating and sleeping habits, which further adds to the stress of the project.

I believe in the old axiom, "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." And, while I like to try to live by it as often as I can, the truth is that, as long as you have a boss or bosses above you, the axiom does not apply. If they need you to get it done, and it is their poor planning that caused the emergency, then it is your emergency to deal with.

My current boss, for example, realized that he was going to be overdue on a project because, and he was perfectly willing to admit it, he forgot about it. It slipped through the cracks until the department that needed it reminded him of it. Suddenly, he asked me to drop everything, learn how to do it, and get it done in a couple of days in order to appease the other department. And I, wanting to continue to have a job and get paid, bent over backward, learned the system, did the work, and got it back to him as quickly as I could.

After the last few weeks (months, really) of this level of stress, I may have to ask for an extended time off. I don't want to burn out and do crappy work, or be barely able to get anything done because I'm so mentally exhausted from the grind.

For now, I keep looking at the plus side of things: OT means flex time accrual and extra money coming in. And that's nothing to sneeze at, either.