balance

The last couple weeks have been kinda crazy. In the last two weeks I've worked more than 100 hours. Sickening, eh! It was kinda my own fault, I signed myself up to two different weekend projects, one weekend after the other. Dafty! Always remember to check your calendar before you say yes! I am knackered! Though I must say, it could be worse. It reminds me of my time spent on a different team. This past two weeks were a walk in the park compared to 2018!

It was 2 AM one Monday morning in November. I was sat in darkness, cross-legged on my bed beneath one of the huge Velux windows in my old bedroom. I remember it being a strangely still night outside. For that time of year, it's the prerogative of Scottish weather to be dreadfully cold; whistling winds, thundering rain, the lot. Those stereotypes are definitely true, but not tonight. Save the occasional car or articulated lorry passing on the A road outside, all was deadly silent around me. A stark comparison to what was going on inside my head.

I'd been working all week. My mind was racing, huge black bags had formed under my eyes and both eye lids were heavy, quivering like a weight-lifter that had hit the wall. I hadn't had much sleep that weekend, nor would I get much more that night either. The only light source was from a flickering street lamp outside. The same street lamp which had partially illuminated my room every night for the last 21 years. Well, it wasn't the only light source. My company-issue ThinkPad was open in front of me, a cable running from the charging port, down the side of the bed and into a wall socket beneath a cubby where my alarm clock used to sit. It was a digital alarm clock, with docking station and DAB digital radio, but I only ever used it to wake myself from the dead each morning. I hadn't even read the instructions for the radio.

I thundered notes into a ticket, clackidey-clack clack clack. A keyboard warrior. I was on the Global Backups team, responsible for making sure we were sufficiently covered by backups to recover ourselves and our customers from anything thrown our way. Everything from crypto-lockers to some dafty formatting a disk, nothing was unheard of. I was on a 1-in-2 rota with someone in a different office. Our primary focus was on EMEA, only a third of the global workload yet still it meant early mornings, long days and late nights spent at the laptop. Completely on my own, with all hell breaking loose around me, often I didn't know which fire to put out first. I'd spend the vast majority of the week preparing for the weekend, be it changes, investigations, reports on what happened the previous weekend or how to combat those issues the following weekend. My life was consumed by byte counts and compression rates, retention policies and success/failure reports. 

When I first started on the team, I felt so grown-up and responsible. I moved away from the service desk and into a team where I could specialise in a very specific aspect of the infrastructure. I was given so much responsibility so very early on and was eager to get right in about it - as we say in Scotland! Before long, people were coming to me for help and advice and truth be told, I liked it. It was validation that people recognised who to go to for X, Y and Z. People trusted me to get shit done. I was loving my first couple months. Little did I know quite what I was letting myself in for.

The hours were unsustainable. The work within my remit was actually pretty routine, but I had assumed more responsibility than was actually in my contract and often this stress was too much for me to handle - especially at first. Every second week I'd put in somewhere between 12 and 15 hours of overtime between 5 PM Friday and 9 AM Monday. And during that window I was on my own, or at least I felt I was. I was under pressure to make the right decisions. Full admin rights at my fingertips and an entire continents worth of backups at stake. One mistake could be devastating, literally costing me my job and the company millions in lawsuits. All this would be running through my head in the early hours of the morning when things weren't going well. I was struggling to even keep my eyes open.

The next morning, I needed to sit down with Senior Management for the weekly "Critical Call." Trust me, that scared the shite out me when I was first invited. I really thought that was the meeting they were going to slide a P45 across the table at me for missing something! But no, it's actually a meeting to analyse all the critical calls (hence the name) from the previous weekend that had resulted in a call-out. Around the long beech table in the boardroom would sit senior managers and directors from every line of business in EMEA. Then there was me, a kid with (at the time) just three years experience in the industry - less than a year of which was in the infrastructure line of business. Everyone else had years of experience under their belts and entire teams of people reporting to them. I was a nervous wreck. Each call-out made costs the company money in overtime, so they want to know where that money is going and whether it can be prevented in future. With the number of hours I was putting through, these critical calls were costing the company close to a grand every two weeks, so they wanted to know what the hell was going on - and quite rightly so!

Each week I grew more and more nervous prior to the meeting, knowing things weren't getting much better. The atmosphere in the boardroom felt more and more tense with every passing week. When it came my turn to speak, my voice would crack, I'd trip over my words, I wouldn't know where to look and I'd be sweating like you wouldn't believe. We'd discuss next steps and action items and other jargon and after an hour I'd emerge from the boardroom doors with some advice dispensed to my notepad and my job intact. Even if the first few times I needed to nip to the toilet to splash my face - and check I hadn't shit my pants!

Walking out of that meeting each week without being sacked was a relief - it almost felt like a win to me. Although I knew I'd have to tackle that all over again the following week and the thought of that would linger in the back of my head. So I'd knuckle down and get the recommendations provided to me in place and tested - and more often than not it made no difference or something else would break. And the cycle would repeat itself. This went on for nearly two years. Though in hindsight, I don't think I was ever actually close to getting the sack. It was all in my head. It was imposter syndrome, combined with my inexperience when it came to meetings of any sort, never mind ones with the senior-most managers and directors this side of the pond! The saving grace of it all was Nicola, my unofficial boss who would join the meetings with me to back my corner a bit, helping defuse particularly difficult lines of questioning.

It was a rough period of my life. You shouldn't ever have to feel that uncomfortable at your work, never mind on a weekly basis! My dad had warned me right at the start, too. He said I was burning the candle at both ends and eventually something was going to give. Until eventually, it did.

I clickedy-clacked the last update on my final ticket of the night. "Completed successfully, resolving.." I'd type, before closing the laptop. By this point it was closer to 3 AM. I knew I needed at least a few hours sleep before my 6.30 AM alarm went off, but there was still so much racing through my mind that I couldn't switch off. I'd eventually manage a couple hours sleep, if you could call it that. More of a long nap, short bursts of sleep, interrupted by tossing and turning and sighing. 

Soon the rhythmic dee-dee, dee-dee of morning would arrive. I used to tell myself that I didn't need much sleep because I rarely had trouble getting myself out of bed. The truth (I think) was that I was never in a deep sleep long enough to find it difficult to wake from it. I'd float through my morning routine, paying little attention to what I was doing, as if I were on power-saving mode. Shower, shampoo, shave. Wallet, keys, phone. Often my phone had not finished charging before I was dragging it out the house - not unlike myself! On colder mornings, I'd start the car and leave it running with the heater on full while the engine warmed and the windows de-iced. If I had the time, I'd sit with a cuppa and stare at nothing in particular while it did it's thing. Once parked up at the train station, I needed a caffeine fix. I rummaged into the glove box for my emergency fiver. My gran always told me to keep an emergency fiver in the car, just in case you break down and need to get a bus or a taxi. Coffee is an emergency, right? Or at least I'd break down without one!

I had my walk down the ramp to the platform timed perfectly. Locking the car, I'd throw my bag over one shoulder and flick the woman at the coffee cart my emergency fiver. In exchange she'd hand me a gorgeous latte, a super enthusiastic smile and a thank you and I'd board the train. God, I miss that coffee cart! On the short train journey I'd check email several times, just to see what I was walking in to.

Rolling into Glasgow, the wheels screeching on the ice-cold rails, I'd battle my way through the crowds to reach the outside world. Then followed a short walk uphill to the office, past some hipster breakfast burrito bars, past taxi drivers laughing among themselves and smoking cigarettes by their cabs; past businessmen with umbrellas and briefcases and who spoke nonsense to people down the phone; past puddles of sick left behind from Sunday night club-goers. I was jealous of them. I'd have loved to have been that kind of drunk the night before. At least I'd have been tired for a good reason, right?

I finished my coffee before I had even left the train, yet walked with it six blocks up the street, up three flights of stairs, into the office, past reception and all the way to my desk - where it would linger for an hour or so before being chucked straight in the bin. You see, I hated carrying coffee cups that actually had coffee in them. I seemed to always spill them, all over my hands, cuffs, trousers, the pavement, I wasn't at all elegant! But walking in with a to-go coffee cup was a weird kind of status symbol to me. If I was going to buy a coffee, I wanted everyone to know I'd bought a coffee. But so as not to embarrass myself as I strutted into the office, I'd neck most (if not all) of its contents while stationary. I had vanity issues, leave me alone!

But I was far too tired for strutting today. On autopilot, I made it to reception when my manager's manager spotted me. We exchanged hello's and he said "Don't you look dreadful, rough weekend?" There was a pause while I pretended to laugh, "I wish Matt, I was on-call," I replied, "up till.. like... 3 AM last night with the backups." I'd pretend to estimate how long I was up for, despite knowing I was correct. His eyes widened and jaw dropped a little, "You're joking?" I shook my head. "Step into my office for a second." he said, gesturing me towards his door, "I was going to get some time with Nicola and yourself today, but now seems as good a time as any."

The door closed silently behind me as I sat in a chair opposite his desk. "Right," he said, getting straight down to business, "How's things?" I smiled, knowing full-well that I looked like shit.

There followed a conversation about workload and work-life balance, time between shifts and how the team was coping. He manages the guy that manages the team, so I sugar-coated it a little out of politeness - but the bottomline was it was killing me. He said that both he and Nicola could tell that it hadn't been a great year for me work-wise. And he was right, I wasn't in a great place. A while beforehand, Matt had spoken to me about potentially expanding the Glasgow office side of the team and making me the lead of it. By this point, I was practically doing the job anyway, so it would have just been a change of title, but the demands of the role were already taking its toll on me. I'd changed. I wasn't quite so good-natured and upbeat as I was before. If I'm honest, I was one bad weekend away from leaving to work in Tesco, or maybe PetsAtHome. For the puppies, if nothing else! His parting words were, "I'll speak to Chris and Nicola, leave it with me," and I shuffled from his office to my desk where I plonked myself down, unsure of how long I could hang in there for.

Just a few weeks later, I was placed on secondment to the Global Server team, a move which was later made permanent. Suddenly I was on a team of highly technical people, some of whom had progressed through the ranks of the company, while others had been hired externally. Suddenly I had a team of people to share the workload and the overtime with, to teach things to and learn things from. I had a manager who actually managed me and a team I could rely on. My work-life balance was infinitely better for it and I was able to start rebuilding bridges with the friends I'd lost touch with over the past couple years. I was starting to thrive again. Once I'd settled, one of the guys asked if my job move came with a pay increase, to which I replied "No, I never really asked about it either." He contested that of course, and I can understand his perspective. A change of job, where more responsibility and technical knowledge is expected, is usually met with an increase in pay. But that wasn't what I moved for. As far as I'm concerned, there are two reasons why you change your job: better money or a better balance. I chose the latter, putting my health and happiness before my wallet.

It never seems like you're on the path to burnout until your soles start smouldering. It was a horrible experience, but on the other side of it I learned a few things. I struggled on my own for far too long. Not with the job technicalities as such, but with the tole it was taking on my quality of life. I really should have spoken up about it, but didn't. It took somebody else noticing the weight I was baring before I said anything. You should definitely voice any concerns you have about your role, especially if you feel like your health is suffering. Plus I learned not to under-value myself. After a couple years of weekly meetings that questioned (indirectly) why the hell I was being paid so much, I was feeling guilty for claiming the overtime I'd done. When really, if investments in upgrades are made, they pay for themselves in no time! Companies of course want to reduce their operating costs, but don't let them do that at the expense of their staff. But perhaps most importantly, I learned that no amount of money on earth can buy back one second of time. That's the true cost of working a job that brings you dissatisfaction.

For more on burnout, see my previous post on slowing down.

~ Aedan