Perspective

After Tuesday's team meeting, our lead sent in the equivalent of the robot SWAT team. We worked 10-12 hours days, continued to discuss work over late dinners, and I didn't get to talk to M for most of the week because I wasn't out of work before he went to bed (on the East Coast). Fun Times.

Talking to J and K put some of this in perspective. The projects we work on have struggled since their inception, and it's no one person's fault or responsibility when we can't rescue them on a given time scale. It's easier to shrug off platitudes when they come from a coworker who has never stood in your shoes, or a boss whose paycheck rests on your continued efforts. But when the one person who has beat their head against the same brick wall tells you something... it's hard to ignore.

That doesn't mean the stress has abated, or that I'm any less frustrated or angry about the situation I'm in. Just that I'm making a renewed effort to not see it as a personal failure. It is still hard to walk out my front door every morning and find (again) the capacity to hope that we will move past this. Doing the work isn't hard, but believing that it will make a difference is.

I still don't know if we'll solve this in time to save the project, or even if this will be the last big stumbling block on the road to progress. But those are hurdles for another day. Right now I need to take a long hard look at some scripts, and start a new set of experiments. If nothing else, I want to know at the end that I did everything I could to move this toward a positive resolution.