A weight lifted

Among the many reasons* I haven't been blogging as frequently in the past few months as I have done before is that there's been A Thing. And The Thing has been Bothering Me. Once there's A Thing, my mind is more or less incapable of doing anything other than stewing on The Thing. And if I can't write about The Thing, I find it nigh on possible to write about anything else. And until today, I haven't been able to write about The Thing.

But now... The Thing is gone!

The Thing, in this case, being a Problem Employee. And today, his contract of employment was terminated. Despite my usual tendency to rant, swear, profane and otherwise let off steam, I felt professionally obliged not to write anything about this situation somewhere that is essentially totally public. And, actually, I still feel the same. Despite my frustrations, Problem Employee is a person with feelings and rights, and I don't think it's fair to write anything here about him.

So I shall draw a discrete veil across the matter and let you know only that my life is now, I hope, going to be considerably less stressful in one major respect. The fact that we've now got one less employee, and a chunk of his workload is going to revert to me is a totally different issue and one that I'm currently ignoring.

Last week I undertook a "work to rule" experiment, and refused to bring any work home with me. I ended up a much happier bear than I've been for several months, which was a salutary lesson. I didn't make very much progress on my design projects though...

So, I can foresee some quite serious conflicts between, on the one hand, my work ethic, my desire to go a good job, and my sense that I am partially responsible for the success and failure of the current projects and, on the other hand, my need to look after myself, my health, and my relationships with friends and family. I'm not sure there is a work-life balance that will see both demands satisfied, but I am going to try very hard to remember that nobody ever reaches the end of their lives and wishes they'd spent more time at work...


* Most of those reasons are work. If I am sat in front of a computer, I am working. If I turn my laptop on at home, it's usually to work. It's ten to ten at night and I've just finished writing a design overview as an output from a meeting I had to call today to prevent a project going off the rails.