Worklife

Today was a depressing day with work.

I finished a big chunk of work yesterday and merged the new changes into my code. The new changes broke my local version – nothing to do with what I’d done, they were just buggy and I had a lot more test data in my database. Working around this pretty much killed my productivity (and will to live) yesterday, but by the end of the day I was satisfied my changes were compatible so I checked them in and logged off.

The build/tests take about an hour to run so I logged on this morning to see the results, and… disaster, the tests were failing. Anyway the short version is that I spent all day trying to fix and work around other people’s problems. At about 4:45 I realised that there was one issue left and this one really was my fault, but as I’d been working since 8:00 I decided to leave it until tomorrow and went out for a walk. Unfortunately I left my emails open and when I came back I saw that another developer had checked in code to fix my bug with the comment “fix this insanity”. If I was in a different state of mind I might have found that offensive, but his choice of words says more about him than me. And I thought it was a bit rich as I’d have had this solved by 8:30 if I hadn’t had to work around all the problems he’d caused.

So anyway, I thought to myself “hmm”. I don’t feel very motivated at the moment and I don’t think the problem is me. When things like this happen I’m acutely aware that I’ve been here for well over a year and haven’t had a pay review. That’s not very good. This is the first time in my life I’ve worked more than 12 months without a pay adjustment.

So tonight I went on totaljobs and sent off my CV to two places.

Over the weekend I was feeling a bit stressed and guilty by the fact I wasn’t really making any progress with this job search. I had an interview in November and then basically did nothing again until very recently. If I still saw my counsellor I’d have probably gone there and admitted to her at some point recently that the prospect seems daunting and I’ve been avoiding it on purpose, on some level, and that’s just me and my anxiety.

So after much thought I decided to bump myself up to a three quarter dose of Citalopram. I’d always intended to go up to the full dose after Christmas to deal with job seeking stress and interviews.