Where has the year gone?
Hey! I'm not dead. I guess that's an accomplishment. I've been well aware that I haven't been active here, or anywhere really, for a very long time, and I've been meaning to write an entry, but I couldn't get myself to actually sit down and do it. One of the benefits of this is that I can do a better summary of the past few months using hindsight, rather than just bitching as things happened.
I will say up front that things have been pretty good in general - just very different from how they were a year ago.
Work is really the part that's more or less good but different from a year ago. As a reminder of where I was a year ago, I work for a software company that provides developers, QA, and devops to other companies, and we have one major client that takes most of our resources. In general, that client company was pretty schizophrenic and thus our work was also pretty schizophrenic. At the time, we'd just come off a really tough project - 6 weeks of 12-hour days, no weekends or holidays - and we'd shipped two days late, and the client company scapegoated my husband for that "failure" (no, it wasn't a failure - the software worked as desired and the deadline was soft; the CTO was looking for someone to point a finger at so that no one would scrutinize his poor design and project vision) and removed him from the project, causing a cascading collapse of basically everything, as they did not replace the person who had been holding everything together.
At the beginning of this year, the client company reorganized into three "business units" (BUs) and our company, as well as other companies that worked for the client, were distributed among the business units. Now, I think that the reorg was a good idea, and it really allowed the client to focus on what they want to do, but one of the BUs - the biggest one, of course - continued under bad leadership and even after a year, is still highly disorganized.
I don't know if I got lucky or what, but I got assigned to the smallest BU, which is also the best organized one. What our leader, D, told me, was that when they broke up the original project team, the big BU was given first choice of who to take, then the middle BU got their choice. Then the last BU got to see who was left, and D saw me and about four other people on the list and went, "They didn't take them? Insane!" and snapped us up before the other two BUs could reconsider (which they were doing - the other two BUs get all the favor, and ours gets the table scraps). D's an incredible leader and organizer, and our BU has delivered our projects before deadline consistently all year.
(I think that one of the reasons the other two BUs didn't take me was that I'm listed as a software QA analyst and neither BU values QA at all. The middle one has no QA group, and the big one has two analysts (both from our company) who are told not to do anything. Seriously. They actually do nothing all day. At least they get paid.)
D brought me in as the QA manager, and I've picked up the mantle of release manager, but, well, I still don't know what to think. I can do this work, and the BU needs this work, and I've been successful at it so far, but it's not what I like to do, nor what I want to do. I want to do QA - analyzing and testing software and process. I'm also not sure they're utilizing me well. My skills lie in technical analysis, but they have me doing manager work, which they could easily find someone who could do better. (As evidenced by the bad grammar in that sentence. Sheesh.)
On the other hand, I love working for this BU. Everyone, from the exec on top and the directors from the client company, through the managers and ICs (that's "individual contributors" - meaning anyone who's not a manager or above) are excellent. The directors consistently look out for us and attempt to improve things so to protect our work/life balance and psychological safety - which is a huge contrast to the other two BUs, which are perfectly happy demanding constant 60-hour workweeks from their workers.
So, tl;dr, work life is good but not necessarily happy. And this is fine. I've had worse.
I've noticed that now that I'm doing manager work, my work tends to intrude on my non-work time. The worst part is waking up at 5 a.m. and then not being able to get back to sleep because some work thing enters my mind and won't go away. That happened rarely when I was an IC, but now that I'm a manager, it'll happen about 3 times a week, often on weekends (which is the worst).
Otherwise, things for the past few months have been, well, boring. I haven't had much motivation to do anything, like pursue hobbies, for a while, so calligraphy, Metal Earth models, miniatures painting, etc. have been largely neglected. I've mostly been playing video games, and even that has paled in the last month or so. Every evening, I find myself just wondering what to do.
One thing that I have been doing regularly is Duolingo. I've been meaning to pick up a little German in anticipation of someday going on holiday to Germany and Austria (which will probably never happen, but anyway, it's really helpful to be able to read signs and such, even if you can't actually speak the language) so I finally started. I have a dedicated half-hour or so to study just before I go to sleep, so I've been keeping up daily work for over four months now. I have the worst time trying to remember the genders of nouns and that die Familie goes with ist and not sind (despite the fact that this matches American English; it's British English that would think it'd be sind), but otherwise I think I'm doing pretty well. Just don't make me actually speak to someone.
I have picked up music again, but that's mostly because the community band that I play with most of the year has restarted, after not meeting since the pandemic began. It's the only thing that gets me out of the house and socializing. One of the conductors of that band, Tim, has become a good friend since I first met him ten years ago. He invited me and another band member to come to his house to practice trombone back in November... and then came down with covid the next day, though I didn't find out until five days later. (He had actually tested negative the day before, so, no, he wasn't being reckless inviting us over.) So, I dutifully quarantined myself in my room for a few days to protect my husband and tested myself regularly. Then I got sick of it and lifted my quarantine... and I never did test positive. Yay! :) Tim's all better now, too.
So now Tim has invited me to join his Dixieland jazz band - they need a clarinetist and I guess they can't find anyone else. :/ No, he didn't put it like that. Clarinet is my main instrument, as that's what I played in high school, and you have to understand, while it's the thing I play best, I'm not all that good at it. Moreover, I've only ever done concert band music, which more or less equates to classical stuff, and I play what's written on the page. Jazz is different - the page tells you the chords and you kinda just make stuff up based on that. I've never tried that before, and honestly, that's just not how I think. I avoid any kind of seat-of-the-pants creativity.
But, I thought, might as well try, so I attended their rehearsal this weekend, and it was fun! I did rather suck at it, but actually, with Dixieland jazz, you can pretty much do anything and it'll sound fine. The biggest mistake you can make is to play without confidence - a "wrong" note played strong and true will fit right in, but a "right" note that just dribbles out sounds like you don't know what you're doing. So, I've decided to keep trying, at least through February, when they have their next performance, to see if I want to keep doing this.
Another thing that I haven't done much of is writing. Or at least I thought so. I feel like I haven't done anything significant at all this year, but looking back at AO3, I've posted seven stories since January, and only one was less than 1000 words. Four were old WIPs that I completed and refined, but three were completely new works.
In addition, I've been writing bits and pieces for the comm I share with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
romanajo123, ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
tenminutesaday, and you know, looking back at that, I realize I've been writing quite a bit - maybe not all the time and maybe only bits and pieces for various things, but it's not insignificant. Some of them could be posted as individual stories, and some are close enough that it shouldn't take much to finish them off and post them. So, perhaps I'll just have to do that.
And that's about it for now. I do want to talk about Doctor Who, but not in this post. I will say, though, that we're going to Gallifrey One in February, and we're really looking forward to it.
I will say up front that things have been pretty good in general - just very different from how they were a year ago.
Work is really the part that's more or less good but different from a year ago. As a reminder of where I was a year ago, I work for a software company that provides developers, QA, and devops to other companies, and we have one major client that takes most of our resources. In general, that client company was pretty schizophrenic and thus our work was also pretty schizophrenic. At the time, we'd just come off a really tough project - 6 weeks of 12-hour days, no weekends or holidays - and we'd shipped two days late, and the client company scapegoated my husband for that "failure" (no, it wasn't a failure - the software worked as desired and the deadline was soft; the CTO was looking for someone to point a finger at so that no one would scrutinize his poor design and project vision) and removed him from the project, causing a cascading collapse of basically everything, as they did not replace the person who had been holding everything together.
At the beginning of this year, the client company reorganized into three "business units" (BUs) and our company, as well as other companies that worked for the client, were distributed among the business units. Now, I think that the reorg was a good idea, and it really allowed the client to focus on what they want to do, but one of the BUs - the biggest one, of course - continued under bad leadership and even after a year, is still highly disorganized.
I don't know if I got lucky or what, but I got assigned to the smallest BU, which is also the best organized one. What our leader, D, told me, was that when they broke up the original project team, the big BU was given first choice of who to take, then the middle BU got their choice. Then the last BU got to see who was left, and D saw me and about four other people on the list and went, "They didn't take them? Insane!" and snapped us up before the other two BUs could reconsider (which they were doing - the other two BUs get all the favor, and ours gets the table scraps). D's an incredible leader and organizer, and our BU has delivered our projects before deadline consistently all year.
(I think that one of the reasons the other two BUs didn't take me was that I'm listed as a software QA analyst and neither BU values QA at all. The middle one has no QA group, and the big one has two analysts (both from our company) who are told not to do anything. Seriously. They actually do nothing all day. At least they get paid.)
D brought me in as the QA manager, and I've picked up the mantle of release manager, but, well, I still don't know what to think. I can do this work, and the BU needs this work, and I've been successful at it so far, but it's not what I like to do, nor what I want to do. I want to do QA - analyzing and testing software and process. I'm also not sure they're utilizing me well. My skills lie in technical analysis, but they have me doing manager work, which they could easily find someone who could do better. (As evidenced by the bad grammar in that sentence. Sheesh.)
On the other hand, I love working for this BU. Everyone, from the exec on top and the directors from the client company, through the managers and ICs (that's "individual contributors" - meaning anyone who's not a manager or above) are excellent. The directors consistently look out for us and attempt to improve things so to protect our work/life balance and psychological safety - which is a huge contrast to the other two BUs, which are perfectly happy demanding constant 60-hour workweeks from their workers.
So, tl;dr, work life is good but not necessarily happy. And this is fine. I've had worse.
I've noticed that now that I'm doing manager work, my work tends to intrude on my non-work time. The worst part is waking up at 5 a.m. and then not being able to get back to sleep because some work thing enters my mind and won't go away. That happened rarely when I was an IC, but now that I'm a manager, it'll happen about 3 times a week, often on weekends (which is the worst).
Otherwise, things for the past few months have been, well, boring. I haven't had much motivation to do anything, like pursue hobbies, for a while, so calligraphy, Metal Earth models, miniatures painting, etc. have been largely neglected. I've mostly been playing video games, and even that has paled in the last month or so. Every evening, I find myself just wondering what to do.
One thing that I have been doing regularly is Duolingo. I've been meaning to pick up a little German in anticipation of someday going on holiday to Germany and Austria (which will probably never happen, but anyway, it's really helpful to be able to read signs and such, even if you can't actually speak the language) so I finally started. I have a dedicated half-hour or so to study just before I go to sleep, so I've been keeping up daily work for over four months now. I have the worst time trying to remember the genders of nouns and that die Familie goes with ist and not sind (despite the fact that this matches American English; it's British English that would think it'd be sind), but otherwise I think I'm doing pretty well. Just don't make me actually speak to someone.
I have picked up music again, but that's mostly because the community band that I play with most of the year has restarted, after not meeting since the pandemic began. It's the only thing that gets me out of the house and socializing. One of the conductors of that band, Tim, has become a good friend since I first met him ten years ago. He invited me and another band member to come to his house to practice trombone back in November... and then came down with covid the next day, though I didn't find out until five days later. (He had actually tested negative the day before, so, no, he wasn't being reckless inviting us over.) So, I dutifully quarantined myself in my room for a few days to protect my husband and tested myself regularly. Then I got sick of it and lifted my quarantine... and I never did test positive. Yay! :) Tim's all better now, too.
So now Tim has invited me to join his Dixieland jazz band - they need a clarinetist and I guess they can't find anyone else. :/ No, he didn't put it like that. Clarinet is my main instrument, as that's what I played in high school, and you have to understand, while it's the thing I play best, I'm not all that good at it. Moreover, I've only ever done concert band music, which more or less equates to classical stuff, and I play what's written on the page. Jazz is different - the page tells you the chords and you kinda just make stuff up based on that. I've never tried that before, and honestly, that's just not how I think. I avoid any kind of seat-of-the-pants creativity.
But, I thought, might as well try, so I attended their rehearsal this weekend, and it was fun! I did rather suck at it, but actually, with Dixieland jazz, you can pretty much do anything and it'll sound fine. The biggest mistake you can make is to play without confidence - a "wrong" note played strong and true will fit right in, but a "right" note that just dribbles out sounds like you don't know what you're doing. So, I've decided to keep trying, at least through February, when they have their next performance, to see if I want to keep doing this.
Another thing that I haven't done much of is writing. Or at least I thought so. I feel like I haven't done anything significant at all this year, but looking back at AO3, I've posted seven stories since January, and only one was less than 1000 words. Four were old WIPs that I completed and refined, but three were completely new works.
In addition, I've been writing bits and pieces for the comm I share with
romanajo123, tenminutesaday, and you know, looking back at that, I realize I've been writing quite a bit - maybe not all the time and maybe only bits and pieces for various things, but it's not insignificant. Some of them could be posted as individual stories, and some are close enough that it shouldn't take much to finish them off and post them. So, perhaps I'll just have to do that.And that's about it for now. I do want to talk about Doctor Who, but not in this post. I will say, though, that we're going to Gallifrey One in February, and we're really looking forward to it.