Back to Work
Life • January 9th, 2007Doesn’t it suck when a long vacation is over?
Some time in a previous life, when I used to work as a financial analyst for a big company, my team’s manager had just been pulled to work on a top-secret super-critical strategic project. Her manager — my VP — had asked me and a coworker to act as leads for the two main things our team handled while he looked for a new manager: I was the lead for ad-hoc analysis, and he was the lead for sales support. My VP, who I adored, saw this as a leadership opportunity for me. I, however, felt like I had been faking leadership potential all my life, rarely able to trust people enough to delegate responsibilities, so all incoming requests at the time simply meant more work for me.
One happy Monday during that time, I was coming back from vacation. If I’m right, I think I was actually coming back from my honeymoon, when this guy who managed a Finance group at the corporate level drops by my cube first thing that day… I was only putting away my purse and hanging my coat, when the guy starts talking to me about this very important request he has for some ad-hoc analysis from my team. He starts describing to me the nature of the request, and it’s sounding like one of those where you need to dig for days through five years of old financials (which my team didn’t handle), finding numbers by all kinds of views and details (which my team didn’t have), making all kinds of educated guesses for all the data missing (our specialty), and then you need to put together a huge spreadsheet showing all these different views and scenarios, and by the way, this all needs to be done by the end of the day, because the most feared guy on the floor wants to see it very soon.
He’s talking and I’m dying inside thinking that there is just nobody in the team who can take the fricking project from hell, so it will have to be ME, and I just got back from vacation, and have not even downloaded the 1000 messages of unread email. I don’t even know what the hell it is that he wants. And why. And because I can be pretty transparent when I want to, somehow I don’t know what it is that I do, what horrible face I make, or what words escape my mouth, but the next thing I know is that the guy is backing away from my cube CAREFULLY and facing me like I am a tiger as he says “Don’t worry about it… I’ll take care of it… I’ll ask Fulano to crunch some quick numbers for me”.
I have to believe I was simply lucky that day, but sometimes I wonder what it is that he saw to let me go like that. Did I transform into a horrible witch? A wild cat? Did my voice sound like a high-pitched nag he couldn’t run fast enough from? Did I look like I was about to burst into tears?… I once was at the opposite end of that situation. My manager had just come back from her vacation, and I dropped by her cube to tell her about some terrible problem. She got frustrated, and cried, and through her tears, I could see her fierce grinding teeth asking me how (the hell) she could help me. So I backed away from her sight promising her that I didn’t need anything from her and I would take care of it. And since then, I don’t bug people on the day when they are coming back from vacation.
Today is actually day 2 back to work after the long holidays. I work from home, “for myself”, so I don’t have to worry about random bombs of poop dropped on my lap during this delicate time. I managed to put 65% of the time I wanted to put on billable work today, but interrupted the flow to read a few blog posts. I discovered that a blog I would read occasionally is dead, and it strikes me that recently I’ve read a lot of “blogs will die soon” opinions, and a few web celebrities are coming out and saying that they are tired of blogging. I’m also finding that some of the big bloggers I read are boring me. I haven’t done a New Year’s house cleaning, but it feels like my brain is trying to. It’s asking me to not read everything that shows up in my feed reader. It’s asking me unsubscribe from a few sites — and I have. It’s also begging me to focus today, so I guess I need to crack the whip and stop this post now. Welcome to 2007.
