Special Ops Engineering: Support Group

I've changed my outbound flight twice and my return flight three times in the last four days. That's just the sort of week it's been. The upside of staying up here another night (for a service call with NO PARTS!) is that I got to have dinner in SF with one of my coworkers.

You know, the guy who's working insane hours trying to keep on top of everything and slowly realizing he no longer has a social life... I was that guy in my first year too, less the "guy" part, of course. ;)

Some times you have to just sit down with someone else who walks the walk and check in. Otherwise it gets really lonely. It's hard to explain the sort of stresses our travel schedules create on relationships with friends and family.

We chatted about the soul-eating aspects of man hours reports, travel-heavy weeks/months/years, and how hard it is to set boundaries that let us put the job down and get in some recovery time. Recovery time can be loosely defined as an opportunity to do laundry, or vent about our customers/coworkers/boss, or even just cook a meal in your own kitchen and eat without also typing an email on your phone. It's the little stuff that a lot of other people take for granted amidst their myriad of weeknight activities or events.

It's probably not the best idea to introduce someone with no free time to WoW, but the prospect of being able to connect with people who can relate whilst bashing monster skulls in with a big shiny axe/sword/pole arm/mace is quite therapeutic when you have no idea where you'll be on any given day. It helps M and I keep in touch when we're traveling, and our work buddy may join in, too. It might give him a reason to put down the metric hex keys and context shift away from the suffocating barrage of email. We'll see.

Everyone copes with the job differently. The people who don't find a way to cope with it burn out, break down and move on. We're going to be down two people in our region soon, so I do hope our coworker finds a way to cope with the stress. Otherwise we'll be down three people soon.

As for me, I'm finally getting ready to board my flight home. The one that was originally scheduled for 8:45p Wednesday. Yeah... it's been that kind of week.