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jennyaxeSome of you may know that I've been having severe stress problems at work. I crashed rather badly around Christmas last year, was home from work for some months before going back on part time. I've been back on full time since July.
In August I realised that I wasn't really back to full strength, and asked our HR department to let me see the company doctor. They suggested a stress management course. The course didn't materialise, and in September I started nagging again. In October I finally got to see the doctor, who suggested I see a psychologist for an evaluation of what type of help I need.
Now I've been told to go to the stress management course which has just started, together with ten other people. Three months after I first begged for help to not get to the burn-out point again. When I asked why they didn't send me for a one-on-one talk/evaluation, as the doctor had recommended, they reply that since the course will have some opportunities for one-on-one talks it's the same thing. I am not convinced.
My boss has tried to let me have less stressful tasks at work. I'm a sysadmin, which generally means keeping stuff running. Currently I'm supposed to work more with systems design, documentation, planning and generally do the thinking part of the job, leaving the actual doing part to my coworker whom I shall call PFY.
PFY is good at doing stuff, not so good at thinking and planning, so in theory it should work fine. In practice it doesn't. Because I'm still the person who gets all the damnsilly little questions about idiotic thingys the customers want to do and do wrong, and "why doesn't it do foo when I tell it to do bar, please fix".
Currently my high-priority task is to fix the domain statistics thingy for our domainhosting service. The thingy is a horrible mess of various small programs presumably written in C, but I don't know since nobody seems to have the source code. The programs are glued together by means of perl scripts. Again, in theory, this is IMO quite a good idea and it's the way I'd do it too. Only I actually know perl. The guy who wrote these scripts doesn't. And he doesn't work here anymore. And he never finished the documentation before he left. I do have some documentation, which covers about 50 % of the programs involved, only it's a year out of date and during that time the guy was making changes to some programs, renaming several of them and changing the way some of the others work. Again with no documentation. This makes it exceedingly difficult to calculate exactly how long it will take to get the thing to work properly.
For the past weeks I've been rewriting his perl scripts. Well, when I say writing, I mean spending an hour figuring out what his crap was supposed to do, why it didn't do it, what it did instead, and why it didn't do what it should, for each ten minutes of actual coding. Like I said, it's my highest priority. Still, boss told me not to stress, better to actually do it right and take the time it takes, only I shouldn't do anything else while working on this. Except for answering short questions from cow-orkers, of course. Which tend to show up once or twice per hour, disrupting my concentration for half an hour per question.
Last week I gave the boss a status report on Monday. On Tuesday I fell ill with a cold and fever, with the interesting addition of dizziness and nausea. I got back to work yesterday, and spent most of the day catching up on mail and going to meetings - again, no actual work got done. So I decided to work from home today, so I could concentrate and maybe get almost finished.
Then boss sends an email to ask me what the status is. I reply that status is unchanged since the last report, since I'm the one who's working on it and I hadn't been able to work last week. She replies again asking for the exact status. Now, we have a web site where we put up information on current problems, and on that web site I had posted the status last time it changed, so I told her that what's on there is what there is to know, if there was anything more to tell I'd have written it there. And again she gets back, telling me that she needs more information right this minute, and besides, I should update the website even if nothing had changed because otherwise people would think I wasn't working on the problem, and she needed to know how long it would take to get everything fixed, asap.
And that, my friends, was when I fell down in a crying shivering heap of stressed-outedness. And either our HR department backs down and let me have the rehabilitation I have been begging them for the last three months, or I'm back to half time at work. At the most.
Moral: interrupting work asking for the status of said work will not increase work performance. Here endeth the lesson.
In August I realised that I wasn't really back to full strength, and asked our HR department to let me see the company doctor. They suggested a stress management course. The course didn't materialise, and in September I started nagging again. In October I finally got to see the doctor, who suggested I see a psychologist for an evaluation of what type of help I need.
Now I've been told to go to the stress management course which has just started, together with ten other people. Three months after I first begged for help to not get to the burn-out point again. When I asked why they didn't send me for a one-on-one talk/evaluation, as the doctor had recommended, they reply that since the course will have some opportunities for one-on-one talks it's the same thing. I am not convinced.
My boss has tried to let me have less stressful tasks at work. I'm a sysadmin, which generally means keeping stuff running. Currently I'm supposed to work more with systems design, documentation, planning and generally do the thinking part of the job, leaving the actual doing part to my coworker whom I shall call PFY.
PFY is good at doing stuff, not so good at thinking and planning, so in theory it should work fine. In practice it doesn't. Because I'm still the person who gets all the damnsilly little questions about idiotic thingys the customers want to do and do wrong, and "why doesn't it do foo when I tell it to do bar, please fix".
Currently my high-priority task is to fix the domain statistics thingy for our domainhosting service. The thingy is a horrible mess of various small programs presumably written in C, but I don't know since nobody seems to have the source code. The programs are glued together by means of perl scripts. Again, in theory, this is IMO quite a good idea and it's the way I'd do it too. Only I actually know perl. The guy who wrote these scripts doesn't. And he doesn't work here anymore. And he never finished the documentation before he left. I do have some documentation, which covers about 50 % of the programs involved, only it's a year out of date and during that time the guy was making changes to some programs, renaming several of them and changing the way some of the others work. Again with no documentation. This makes it exceedingly difficult to calculate exactly how long it will take to get the thing to work properly.
For the past weeks I've been rewriting his perl scripts. Well, when I say writing, I mean spending an hour figuring out what his crap was supposed to do, why it didn't do it, what it did instead, and why it didn't do what it should, for each ten minutes of actual coding. Like I said, it's my highest priority. Still, boss told me not to stress, better to actually do it right and take the time it takes, only I shouldn't do anything else while working on this. Except for answering short questions from cow-orkers, of course. Which tend to show up once or twice per hour, disrupting my concentration for half an hour per question.
Last week I gave the boss a status report on Monday. On Tuesday I fell ill with a cold and fever, with the interesting addition of dizziness and nausea. I got back to work yesterday, and spent most of the day catching up on mail and going to meetings - again, no actual work got done. So I decided to work from home today, so I could concentrate and maybe get almost finished.
Then boss sends an email to ask me what the status is. I reply that status is unchanged since the last report, since I'm the one who's working on it and I hadn't been able to work last week. She replies again asking for the exact status. Now, we have a web site where we put up information on current problems, and on that web site I had posted the status last time it changed, so I told her that what's on there is what there is to know, if there was anything more to tell I'd have written it there. And again she gets back, telling me that she needs more information right this minute, and besides, I should update the website even if nothing had changed because otherwise people would think I wasn't working on the problem, and she needed to know how long it would take to get everything fixed, asap.
And that, my friends, was when I fell down in a crying shivering heap of stressed-outedness. And either our HR department backs down and let me have the rehabilitation I have been begging them for the last three months, or I'm back to half time at work. At the most.
Moral: interrupting work asking for the status of said work will not increase work performance. Here endeth the lesson.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-18 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-19 02:25 am (UTC)The thing is, what we call "burn-out" has the technical term of "exhaustion-depression" (as near as I can translate it). So if I'm still getting exhausted from work, and still feeling depressed every damn day, why do they think a stress-management course is the thing to help? I've asked for help with the depression, not with handling stress. And they just don't seem to get it. I can't just go on taking more and more happy-pills just to keep functioning, I've already increased the dosage to four times the initial dosage.
Boss suggest I see a private doctor, as the public health service has a very long waiting time to get to see a therapist or a psychologist. It's just that private doctors don't want to take this kind of case, as it tends to require a lot of time and expense. They prefer patients they can deal with in five minutes and bill for half an hour, instead of the ones that actually require half an hour. So that leaves public health or the company health plan. Ironically, my doctor asked me ten months ago if she should give me a remittance to the psych people, warning me that it'd take at least eight months before they'd actually give me a time. I declined, believing that the work health plan meant what it claims to mean. If I hadn't been idiotic enough to trust my place of work, I might have been getting the help I need for two months now. (Or, equally possible, I'd be whining about the stupid psychologist/therapist they'd assign me...)
no subject
Date: 2003-11-19 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-18 02:04 pm (UTC)Certainly, but I thought you didn't like cheese?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-19 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-18 11:44 pm (UTC)I hope you get what you want/need to destressify(?) from your work soon.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-19 02:26 am (UTC)In other news, I'm going for a second interview with another place on Monday. I get more inclined to take the job with every passing hour...
no subject
Date: 2003-11-22 05:57 am (UTC)Thinking of you, and hoping that the work stress loses its grip on you soon.