A Week in Work Purgatory

Last week was terrible after Monday as well. My team is severely understaffed. At times it has felt like half is out due to illness or long vacations. Everyone who does come into work is finding themselves doing the most repetitive tasks we have two or even three times: once for their own clients, a second time for the absent teammate's clients, and if they're unlucky a third time for another absent teammate whose back-up teammate is also out on holiday... There's barely any time to finish any work beyond the routine, let alone pick up new clients.

My anxiety about the lay-offs that will hit my company soon, is reaching painful levels. I don't know if it was just the clinging humidity and warmth of the past two weeks, but I found myself waking up before 9 a.m. multiple times. The last time I woke up that early above 1x or 2x per year, when not travelling, was for 8 a.m. classes for university, eight or more years ago. And I feel a painful compulsion to work harder and harder as a kind of cosmic bargain to keep my team safe.

It was worst on Friday, when I woke up before 5 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep. Before 7:30 a.m. I started working. And working and working and working. I did take lunch between 1 and 2:40ish p.m., but I think intermittently worked after all due to the anxiety. After about 4 p.m. I was totally exhausted, but I had mandatory training videos that I needed to watch by the end of the day to conform to regulations of the Federal Trade Commission in the US. Because the videos were so incredibly boring I kept getting distracted, and finally logged off my laptop well after 9 p.m.

In between, the just-below-top-management circle contacted me in shock and horror about an apparent major incident regarding our biggest client, that apparently showed an utter breach in my responsibility to monitor client traffic. In fact I think they just spotted a problem on the client's side that the client-facing colleagues and my team had alerted the client to a long time ago and that we have been constantly working on ever since. In fact we'd put at least 75 hours of work into it, in July alone.

I had also handed in a spreadsheet to the top management team, following a template they had given fellow team leads and me and asked to fill out. This template had made my fellow team leads and me all suspicious: we were supposed to list our teammates one by one, rate if were likely to leave the company, list what we could do to keep them in the company (fair enough), and then ... select how much we wanted to keep them in the company on a scale of 1 to 3. We (the team leads who discussed this) all thought: What. the. hell., and all mentioned that we'd put 1 for every teammate. With all affection and respect, I don't really rate the top management team highly for honesty here.

I need another day like that, like I need a hole in the head.