breaking point / the curmudgeon

I haven't updated in a while, and to the 2.7 of you that read this blog, I apologize. Work has been terrible lately, and when I haven't been working, I haven't felt much like spending more time typing. Besides, when all you do is work, there isn't much to talk about anyway. However, in keeping with the way my mind has been working lately, I'll give you some bullet points:

- Most people on my team are also overworked and completely stressed out. My average work week has been 70-90 hours lately. From the minute I wake up in the morning until the time I go to sleep at night, work is pretty much all I've done. And I've noticed that I've had more gray hair in the last six months than I have in the previous 32 years. Not a good sign.

- I've been telling friends in the office that I've been expecting someone on my team to go postal. Not with guns, per se, but in some noticeable way, probably an outburst. I now know of three such outbursts in the last week.

- Outburst 1: the guy who sits in the cubicle behind mine (very cool guy, by the way) lost it in a meeting last week in which he learned he would have some additional responsibilities added to his job. He stood up, screamed "This is f***ing bullsh*t!", stormed out of the room, and left the building. Nobody saw or heard from him for a day and a half after that. Like me, he's been stressed for a long time, so this wasn't all that surprising.

- Outburst 2: the chick who sits in the cubicle across from Outburst 1 is constantly complaining about how she has too much work to do on packaging (one of our responsibilities is to specify what we want on the packaging for the products we design, and then correct the work the artists do for us on a computer). She'd apparently had enough by Tuesday, so she went upstairs to our packaging manager's desk and started screaming at her about how she wanted the packaging computer program modified and how horrible it was, etc. The outburst was apparently so loud that people from several rows over walked up to the packaging manager after Outburst 2 to ask her if she was OK.

- Outburst 3: I emailed my new operations counterpart the other night to inquire if she had asked her counterpart in our Shanghai office about changing shipping lead time for a particular product. I got back a response the next morning which indicated that she thought I was criticizing her and insinuating that she didn't know how to do her job. After replying that that couldn't have been further from the truth, and that if I had a complaint with her I wouldn't beat around the bush, I got back a manifesto about how she didn't know as much about my product categories as her predecessor and needed me to be patient, etc. Not wanting an already long email chain to turn into a novel, I pulled her aside when I got to the office later that morning.

Tidbits from the conversation:

Her: You're such a curmudgeon!

Me: I'm not as grouchy as I look. You should try talking to me.

Her: I don't know why, but I want so badly to please you, but I feel like I'm doing a horrible job.

Me: I'm not your boss. Yes, I have high standards, but my purpose here is not to make your life difficult.

Her: I feel like a half-ass mom and a half-ass employee. I just don't have time to do everything I want to do. (she has two kids, one of which is only a few months old)

Me: You and everyone else on this team. I'm not asking you to spend more time working.

...and so on and so on.

I thought she was going to start crying, which would have been great. Every female that's worked directly for me in this company has cried. I've never made someone who didn't work for me cry before. In all seriousness, though, my email was completely harmless. The hysterical responses I got and the subsequent conversation we had were indication of a bigger problem, a situation that goes way beyond my apparently curmudgeonly self. And by the way, no one has ever called me that before. I mean, come on...am I really that crotchety? I don't think so. No, I don't smile much, but I'm usually nice to people. At least, I think so.

- My idea of "relaxation" lately has been to watch TV while I work. Pathetic, I know. For the past few weeks, I've been watching an incredible amount of "Star Trek". The flavor of the moment has been "Star Trek: Enterprise", which I formerly liked the least of all the different "Star Trek" series, but came to really enjoy as I watched the four seasons that were made earlier this decade over the past couple of weeks. More than anything, I think it's the escape from reality that I like. I finished watching the fourth and final season last night, and I was really bummed out when it was over. It kinds of feels like I have nothing else to look forward to. No, that's not really true, but it's been the only thing I've felt like doing over the past couple of weeks. Maybe I've just been watching too much TV.