A Post About Running - NOT by Shifter!

I registered for a 3.5 mile run/walk today.  It's something that my company is doing, although they aren't paying for it (natch).  I don't really care, as long as I have some incentive to get in shape.  I'm not concerned, because I can easily walk 3.5 miles, but it would be nice to be able to run a fair bit of it.  I'm working my way towards running for 10 minutes at a time, which may not seem like much, but it's a big deal for someone like me.

 

When I lived and worked in Brooklyn, I had gotten to the point where I was walking a lot every week.  I felt pretty good about myself, but when I went to see the cardiologist, he was less enthusiastic.  Don't get me wrong--he's a great guy and he was generally very encouraging.  He told me I was doing a lot of things right, but he basically said that in the time I was spending walking I could be doing a lot better for my heart, and that the first step was do move on to a more challenging activity--something I suspect any personal trainer would have urged me to do a long time ago.

 

And it was clear my body needed it.  Because even though I could walk 10 or 15 miles with relatively little difficulty, running for 3 minutes left me gasping and hurting.  I kept at it, and I had worked up to running almost the whole width of Prospect Park (and felt pretty darn proud of myself) by the time I got this job.

 

But it's way easier to stay fit when you don't have a job.  You can make yourself healthy meals, and it's easy to find time to exercise.  Since I've started this job, and particularly since I've been working these punishing hours, I've had a hard time "finding time" to do either.  I'm hoping that this minor milestone will give me the motivation I need to make time for healthy meal planning and workouts.  Wish me luck....

Surfing Should Be Disabled at 2 a.m.

Then again, this was a very funny quiz:

Biography Channel Dead Soulmate Celebrity Search

Apparently my soulmates are Leonardo Da Vinci, Edgar Allen Poe, or Ernest Shackleton. Then again, maybe I should take the quiz again when I'm actually awake.

Why do we worship deadlines?

If there is an idol that competes with television in our society, I think it is the deadline.  Why is doing something on time so much more important than doing it right?

 

I ask merely because I have been killing myself to meet an unrealistic deadline with no resources for quite some time, now, and people are simply unwilling to let the deadline go.  And at this point I'm almost not even stressed about it, because I've reached the bottom of my personal reserve of resources.  I have called in favors.  I have leveraged developers who work hours I don't work so that progress is made pretty much 24 hours a day.  So if it happens, it happens.  If not, not.

 

But even knowing that we have tried everything and that now there is nothing we can do, there is still this unholy resistance to pushing out the delivery time.  The ship has sailed.  It's not going to happen.  A realistic observer would have known it was never going to happen.  Surely the thing to do at this stage is to inform people that it will change.  But they continue pretending that it's possible we could hit the headline.

 

Meanwhile everything on the project has been done half-assed.  I hate to speak for the developers, but I know at least one of them would say that he hates the code he wrote for this project.  I know the testing was half-assed.  I know my documentation is half-assed.  I know the migration of the data has been half-assed.  All because a) the date we chose conflicted with a much larger project that sucked all the resources out of the corporate atmosphere, leaving us light-headed, starving, and drinking our own urine (metaphorically speaking) and b) we would not move the date, even when it became clear that we could never meet it given the resources we had.

 

I have a deadline of my own.  I am leaving at 4:30 today.  I don't care if they're done.  I have a cable appointment.  Is the cable appointment more important than this project?  No.  But I can't count the things I've given up for this project, among them my health, my sanity, and my sense of proportion.  So today, I'm not giving up cable.  It's like a reverse lent for the deadline god.

Are you happy?

Today I went to a discussion with a senior VP where he invites a bunch of employees into a room and asks them if they're happy.  I left with the impression that everyone is happy except me.

 

Don't get me wrong.  I have a job, and it pays well and provides me with health care.  I work for a good company, and I have worked for much worse.  But after the layoffs that hit our department in January or February, we are overwhelmed.  Managers (not my manager, but the guys above him) keep taking on more work, and they keep giving it to us.  And we keep trying to do it, but we fell behind months ago and have no hope of catching up.  There's no effort to prioritize.  A colleague recently asked a manager to prioritize the 8 projects he'd been given, and the response was, "Well, it all has to get done."  That's pretty typical these days.  Which is why I'm at work at 11 at night.

 

But in this room everyone was happy and enthusiastic.  They all felt like they had work life balance.  I was just sitting there and going, hey, I want to work where they work.  Because I'm pulling 12 and 14 hour days.  This right here?  This is a 15 hour day.  I don't do enthusiasm any more.  If you've seen the Lucy episode where she's got the conveyor belt full of candy, that's pretty much where I'm at.  My bra is full of candy.  My hat is full of candy.  I don't have anywhere left to put the candy.  And then this bright young cheerleadery chickie from another area of IT was all, "What can IT do for you, Mr. Senior VP?"  You know, like when the supervisor comes out to survey Lucy and Ethel's work and says, "speed 'er up!"  I am having trouble acknowledging the divine in that cheerleadery chickie, let me tell you.

 

I should have said something--not just because it's the right thing to do, but because I wouldn't now be tempted to just e-mail the senior VP and say, "I'm at work, and I'm not happy."  But then you're the "negative" person in the room full of cheery, sunny, shiny, happy people.  Which is never a good role.

 

Sorry, gang.  I'm not an effing cheerleader.  I'm at work at 11:18, and I'm not happy.

Finally, Vindication

When I was 35, What Not to Wear (the American version) urged me to throw away my cute miniskirt. I refused, and have worn it for the last two (nearly three) years. And now I feel vindicated. The Times of London gets real with decent advice that doesn't talk down to women over 30. If only I cared just a little bit more, I'd be really excited.