Self-Isolation

I have been taking immune-suppressing medication for almost 25 years. For the first ten years, I saw a slow decline in my body's ability to fight infections. Then, that decline increased over the next five years. For the last almost ten years it has been fairly stable at, I'm guessing, between 60% and 75% of where it was pre-medications.

So, because of that, I have been practicing self-isolation for a long time. I don't go out to concerts, movies, or other large gatherings nearly as often as I used to. I ask my friends and family to stay away if they are sick or think they might be contagious. I wash my hands regularly. I clean the things I touch regularly (like keyboards, screens, pc mouse, telephones, etc.). Basically, I do most of the requirements for COVID-19 already because I have a weakened immune system. And my immune system isn't, really, all that bad; there are people with HIV/AIDS, who take cancer drugs, etc. who have it worse than I do.

As of this writing, I haven't actually left the house at all most days and haven't gone farther than my property line in 25 days. But that started before and will continue long after the current pandemic. It's just what I feel I have to do in order to stay healthy since so few people are conscious of just how sick or contagious they may be. I'm hopeful that this pandemic will teach people that they may be contagious without having symptoms of an illness, or may harm people if they don't stay at home when they do have symptoms, and that they should stay home and use those sick days their company provides. I'm hopeful that companies will start to realize they need to provide all workers with some amount of paid sick days to use going forward.

The end result being that I am amused when I read my friends and family being bored, having cabin fever, with the whole self-isolation deal we all must survive now. I've been practicing it for 15 years now! I play video games, so there's a big time sink. I like to both read and write, so there's more time. I enjoy movies and TV, so there's more time. When I'm feeling healthy enough, I like to ride my stationary bicycle. I play with the cats. I clean. I make meals. I play roleplaying games, including gamemastering for them (which takes a lot of preparation time). I've been exclusively working from home for over ten years now. If my wife doesn't remind me (or, rather, FORCE me) to leave the house every now and then, I can find that I haven't left it in literally months. It's just the way I'm built to stay as healthy as I can be.

Basically, I'm hoping this pandemic tells the world that we should be cognizant of and compassionate toward those who can't protect themselves from disease AND STAY HOME when we are sick. When you have the least bit of illness coming on, you should assume you are contagious and do what you have to in order to keep from making others sick. And businesses should encourage this behavior with time off and other policies -- the fewer people who are sick, the more productive they are. But Americans are taught to gut it out, to work through it, that if you aren't working 60+ hours a week, you are somehow doing less than you should be. The rest of the world has figured out that all this mentality means is a quick trip to the morgue, but Western culture insists on it. I'm hoping that changes.

Work Until You Bleed

If I promise a deadline or a project, or if something happens that causes me to have issues with getting it done on time, I'm more than willing to work overtime and on weekends in order to get the project done on time or as close to it as I can. However, when it is someone else's issue(s) that causes the delay, a lack of support, an arbitrary deadline that someone else has imposed or agreed to on my behalf without discussing with me, or acts of God or similar, then I get frustrated if I have to work OT or weekends in order to, in essence, cover someone else's butt.

My current contract has been too much of the latter lately.

• People who have no knowledge of the tasks involved have been promising due dates to the end-client without discussing with me first and there is an abject refusal to change the dates when I bring up objections.
• My main reviewer has taken a couple of weeks off (2 in the last 6 weeks), plus individual days here and there, which has caused my processes to come to a screeching halt. When asked about the time off, I was told, "She has a family." Yeah, so? So do I. What they mean is, she has young children. My response is, again, yeah, so? She can get a babysitter, she can work off-hours, or she can get a reviewer to fill her place while she's gone. Which leads me to...
• If another reviewer is willing to step in, then the primary hates all of his changes, edits, and decisions and makes me redo a lot of work needlessly.

We have had three days in the last two weeks that were completely lost due to new discussions about the format and structure of the documentation I am producing after I (and my two project managers) thought it was all agreed on and settled. That's 24 hours that could have been spent moving the project forward instead.

This week, in particular, has been bad on a number of fronts:

• More formatting discussion on Monday, which led to the entire rest of the day spent reworking the structure of the document instead of doing more writing.
• Tuesday started with a sudden hardware failure which required most of the day to overcome (involved two trips into the main office and a bunch of IT support from two different companies to get up and running again) plus a dentist visit in the middle of all of it.
• Thursday I woke up to a flooded basement, which had to be dealt with immediately, before stuff was damaged or destroyed by the water.
• Friday started with a login/password issue that IT refused to fix and that is still a problem (but that I got a work-around for).

The dentist visit I was already expecting and planning to work OT to cover, as it meant that I was away from work for about two hours. The flood was really my issue, so I was comfortable with working some OT to make up the time lost dealing with it.

The rest of the issues were either out of my control (hardware failure and IT issues setting up the work-arounds) or someone else's issues (the unending desire for others to make me completely reformat the entire document). It is this time that I begrudge having to work OT for. If the IT people could have set up my substitute PC correctly the first time, and if the IT at the other company would have helped me get the proper software reinstalled and re-set up correctly in anything close to a timely fashion, I wouldn't have lost most of one day. If the people in question would stop futzing with a working document's structure, I wouldn't have lost that day. And a third day was lost because one of the same IT departments refused to assist with the login/password issue that was partly caused by the hardware issue from a few days before. That's a whole lot of OT caused by other people's problems, and that I detest.

The net result of all of this is that I've had to work nearly double the normal work hours this week in order to try to get the document done. I missed the Friday due date, but as of right now, I have 95% of the document done and can get the rest done tomorrow for a potential Monday release. Since coming back from vacation, at which time all the documentation seemed on target for each due date, mostly due to other people's issues and concerns, I have had to work some or all of every weekend (5 so far), plus a bunch of OT.

There is an old adage that I enjoy, "Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." However, due to the nature of the work, the bad planning, the lack of a cohesive review process, and the constant struggle to get everyone to agree on a basic structure and format for the project has caused an emergency on my part. This has turned into a 60 hour work week for me when it shouldn't have been needed. Had the review process been smoother and had the format been agreed to three weeks ago when I thought it was, I would have made yesterday's due date without any issue. The basement flooding (3 work hours "lost" in the morning, made up that evening) and the hardware issues could have been overcome without significant issue, or may not have even been an issue, had everything flowed the way I expected and the way the group had agreed from four weeks ago to yesterday.

I'm only just over five weeks removed from the end of  my vacation, and yet I feel completely burned out due to all these issues caused by other people. My health is suffering from the constant work without relaxation. While I was always impressed by my stoic friends who have to work daily or a lot of OT due to the nature of their jobs or needing to work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, these last five weeks have reaffirmed my esteem for them and their ability to keep going.

I just finished another eight hour day on my Saturday, with more hours expected tomorrow. My next deadline is Wednesday for a third, completely new document. I see more OT in my near future.