A day in the life
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Morning arrives with a scream, as it does most week days. Despite the hour, I'm relieved to know it isn't mine, though after some of the dreams I've had lately, it wouldn't surprise me if it was. The scream comes from an alarm clock, but it sometimes takes my brain a few seconds to figure that out. It's the kind of shrill noise you don't want to hear in a shower scene during a horror movie, and as I'm still not sold on the idea that I'm the protagonist in my own life, it's not the most reassuring way to start the day. The alarm clock is on the other side of the room. It takes me several seconds to stumble out of bed and turn it off. This is deliberate. On the days I used to have an alarm clock next to my bed, it was too easy to hit the button and fall back to sleep. This way, I'm at least up, and even when I don't want to be, it's enough to get me staggering in the right direction.
The right direction is towards the en suite. I'm helped along by a few aggressively affectionate headbutts from one of two cats that arrived when they heard the alarm, and with the kind of gastro-related optimism that domestic cats everywhere have first thing in the morning. For such a tiny creature, he packs a punch when he wants something, and manages to make me spill the water I'm trying to drink to make my mouth taste less like something died in it overnight. My best friend calls him 'adorabubble', but at quarter to six in the morning, it takes him lifting my hand off the bed with his nose so I can fuss him before I'm able to see it.
My morning routine takes me through each stage of those illustrations representing the evolution of man. I use my time in the bathroom to wake up, though not without the heavy sense of reluctance that comes with any work day. I do most of it through muscle memory, while my brain wakes up the bits I need for any given function. Despite being a new build and benefitting from years of construction experience, my house suffers from several poor design choices. One of them is the position of the air extraction unit in the en suite. For some reason, it's on the opposite side of the room to the shower, so it has to pull the steam all the way across the ceiling before it eventually ejects it. What this means is that it hits every light fitting along the way and, over time, manages to fill even the sealed ones with condensation. The net result is that, unless I want to trip the main fuse block and starve the whole house of electricity, I have to shower in the dark. I'd mind slightly less if the extractor was any good. As it is, it would be more efficient to suck the steam out myself through a straw.
After rushing through a brief exercise routine, breakfast, and the usual ablutions that make the more-or-less evolved me look vaguely presentable, I say my goodbyes and leave the house. The walk to the train station is cold, but better than the day before. I assume this is because I'm wearing a thicker coat today and the weather likes to be contrary. Despite the chill, the walk itself isn't unpleasant. I try my best to think of something positive, if only because, when I think of my destination, my pace slows right down and there's a chance I'll miss my train. I arrive on the platform with time to spare. I pass it by looking at my phone and addressing the notifications I'd received overnight. This isn't usually something I do at this point, but the horses that occupy the neighbouring field aren't doing anything of interest today, and it's too early to meet the stare of any of my fellow passengers with a meaningful smile.
The train arrives with its usual lack of fanfare. Since the schools went back, it's harder to get a seat in the morning. I've only had to stand once recently, but some days you need the kind of reactions only a twenty-minute walk in the cold can give you if you want to sit down. Today, I get a seat across the aisle from an actress. She seems familiar, though I think that's because she looks a little like somebody I know, rather than because I've seen her on stage or screen. My trips to the theatre have been minimal of late, and I rarely watch television if I can avoid it. The actress spends her journey reading from what looks, from its formatting and length, to be a stage play. Her lines are highlighted in yellow and there are lots of them. She reads most of it in silence, though becomes animated as she mouths along to her parts, complete with facial expressions and gestures that, if I hadn't noticed the script, might have made me wish I was worse at finding seats. As the train arrives at my station, I find myself hoping that, if it's for an audition, she gets the part—if for no other reason than, when it comes to the arts, I admire her work ethic.
My walk to work is less eventful. For a brief time, I'm stuck on a narrow path behind a guy who struts like somebody far cooler might. I want to assume from the fact he's wearing a tracksuit to work that he's some kind of athlete, but doubt this is the case—firstly because I eventually lose him in an industrial estate, and secondly because I imagine said tracksuit was filled out better when it was still on the hanger. Somehow, I don't die on the rest of the way. Since it isn't a Monday, I opt to consider this a plus. Obviously, I don't die on a regular basis, though on this particular stretch, that always comes as a surprise. I've written before about the dangers of my walks through Rugby. I have to assume that the roads here were designed by somebody who valued form over function, but wasn't particularly good at either. Despite this, he or she seems so proud of their work that the idea of somebody not wanting to use those roads in favour of being a pedestrian was very much an afterthought. At least for the parts I walk, the pavements appear to have been tagged on where there was space, and in some cases only grudgingly. On one stretch, the pavement is so narrow, it wouldn't surprise me if novice tightrope walkers use it to train at weekends. Throw in a lot of blind corners and only slightly fewer dangerous drivers than you'd get on one of those crash compilation videos on YouTube, and my nineteen months of surviving the same journey seems like more of an achievement.
As usual, I'm among the first to arrive at work. The print factory at the back of the building runs twenty-four hours a day during the week, but it's unusual that I see anyone from it unless they're out by the road trying to inhale cancer through a stick. It's rare for there to be more than one or two people in the main office building when I get there, and given that there's a grand total of seven people that work on my floor anyway, it's almost always me that gets to turn on the lights. I'm so used to being the first one in, last one out, and working on my own all day, that most days it doesn't occur to me to mind anymore. Sometimes it's lonely, demotivating and depressing, but in busy periods I can get more done without distractions. If nothing else, it means I don't have to worry if I haven't quite finished evolving when I get there, even if I sometimes miss having a reason to do so.
The first task of the day is to open my emails and die a little inside. They reached unmanageable levels many months ago and I'm well past the point where I can do anything practical with them. My inbox has enough flags to kit out a PGA tour and there are enough individual emails to make sure most of the spectators could have something to dull take home. The sad thing is, I know I don't need to do anything with most of them now, but I haven't been able to find the time while I'm there to do anything about it. The big fear is that there may be several I probably do need to do something with that have long been lost and forgotten in the deluge. Once upon a time, my inbox used to hover at around twenty items, and a handful of those were only in there because the sender said something nice. These days it numbers in the high hundreds and a sender would have to declare themselves my biggest fan before I view their message with any less suspicion than metaphorical camels should view straws.
Part of checking my email includes checking my former line manager's inbox too. It's been thirteen months since he left and dropped me in it, but there's still stuff that comes through to his account. Since then, we've failed to find a replacement. I'm not sure how many agencies we have looking on our behalf. All I know is that they get very excited at the initial idea of earning commission, then fail to do so. Most go quiet a couple of weeks after taking on the role when they realise there's nobody to fill it. Some make token efforts with a handful of CVs that look like they were written during an 'infinite number of monkeys' experiment that ran out of budget. Needless to say, I haven't invited any of those for interviews. After the year I've had, if anybody has earned the right to swing from a climbing frame and throw faeces at the customers, it's me.
After a quick check of my personal email to dismiss one alleging to be from my bank, asking if I'd kindly remind them of my login details because they've misplaced them, I look at the work I have to do and die a little inside. A couple of years ago, somebody came to us to ask if we could take on what would be a fairly substantial project for our small, but willing team. Despite me asking the powers-that-be when we could start working on it several times, nothing seemed to happen for about a year. A few months after we finally started to get the wheels rolling, several of them fell off. My line manager was among the first, handing in his notice and leaving what is probably the biggest project we've ever had to me (albeit, I should add, with some recent freelance assistance that I'm very grateful for). Since then, almost everybody else that was working on it has left too, often with their contributions in various stages of completion. Now months behind, and without the necessary resource, I can't see an end in sight. The only saving grace is that it's always been seen as a 'fun' challenge to take on, but this loses some of its edge when you're on your own at the bottom of the mountain, watching the occasional loose boulder roll down from the top. As it stands, there is a scary amount that I still need to figure out how to do, and if I manage that, I'll also get to experiment with skills I don't yet have to finish off other people's work along the way.
By lunchtime, I've had five more emails and died a little inside. I appreciate that it's a low number. I know of people who have sent and/or received ten times that before the day has even properly started. I have a world of respect for those individuals and don't envy their plight at all, but it's difficult to be grateful for my smaller number when there is already so much to do and more keeps coming in. Of the ones I receive, three of them will end up accounting for about half a day of my time. It isn't as bad as it could be, but will still set back the project I'm supposed to be working on. This is on top of the emails I still need to deal with from last week. Unless they're sent by a friend, there are few emails I look forward to receiving now. I have, however, developed a certain relative fondness for ones I can deal with just by sending a quick reply. If most days it feels like I'm standing in quicksand, emails like that provide something comparable to a solid rock underfoot to briefly push myself towards the surface for a glimpse of sky and a gasp of air. Most emails just add more sand. Some promise a bigger desert.
Lunch consists of a sandwich at my desk. My first employer was located on the edge of Coventry's bustling city centre. They also had a pool table in the break room. Needless to say, I had plenty of options if I fancied some time away from my computer. My current employer was based on the outskirts of Coventry when I first joined, and was a short walk from a busy retail park. At the time, it seemed quite limited next to what I was used to, but compared to where we are now, we were spoilt. My current office is based in a part of Rugby that looks like it evolved by accident. If you were given a collection of everything you'd need to build a decent-sized town, this part would be made of all the bits that didn't fit. For the most part, it consists of offcuts of industrial estates and new builds that, I assume, were organised using a slightly modified version of the game 'pin the tail on the donkey'. Since all the best bits had already been used up elsewhere, the designers seem to have adopted the same approach as they did with the pavements. The upshot of this is that, even on the bits that have pavements, there's nowhere walkable to go for lunch. The one exception is a chain pub that looks like it was the last off a production line. At lunchtimes, it seems to double as the lunch room for a nursing home and comes with a lengthy wait as standard. The office does have a canteen on one side of the factory, but I think the only times I've been in it have been to pass a message on to somebody who was already there about whatever network-related issue constituted an 'emergency' that day. That, and the amount of work I have to get through, means that my lunchbreaks consist of carrying on with what I'm doing while chewing. I believe it's called multitasking.
Since I haven't really stopped what I'm doing, my afternoon consists of more of the same. I re-read a couple of the new emails to see if there's a way to deal with them quicker than I originally hoped. After confirming that isn't the case, I add them to my to-do list and die a little inside. The goal is always to allocate specific time to working on projects and specific time to dealing with support issues, ideally with a bias towards the former. This works well when you're part of a team where there are people to cover you if something important comes up. It works less well when it's just you. The nature of a support environment is that it's reactionary. I pride myself on the quality of the services I provide being high enough that it's rare that they have any serious issues, but when something does go wrong, it needs fixing, regardless of whether it's in your allocated window. I haven't had any major issues like that for a long time. What I do have, however, are demanding customers. Most, I should point out, are lovely. They understand I'm short-staffed and are very accomodating. Of course, they still want their work done, but they get that, while I'll endeavour to do it as quickly as I can, I can only do so much in the time available. There are a handful, however, who feel more entitled to my time, and who are keen to fill it at the earliest convenience.
Early in the afternoon, I get two emails from the same customer in quick succession. When I see both of them are marked as urgent, and one has the word 'urgent' written in the subject line, I die a little inside. I imagine myself in the accident and emergency room in a hospital, watching the doctors and nurses respond to patients to whom the word urgent actually means something. I've worked in IT and development for more than sixteen years now, and it still fascinates me how different people define the term. I'll let it pass for cases where somebody can’t access the systems they need to do their job in a situation where not doing so has cost implications, but I've yet to make a tweak on a website that has changed anybody's life in a significant way. Nevertheless, I grit my teeth and deal with the request, postponing the other things on my list that would have already postponed the project I need to get on with.
Home time rolls around a little later than it used to. Since January, I've been working overtime more or less every working day to (not quite) keep up. For the first couple of months, it was exhausting, but after that, I adjusted. My body, I think, just got used to being wherever I needed it to be. My mind took a little longer. For a while, I cared too much. For various reasons, I felt I needed to. But that came at a cost. I always want to do a good job, but with so much to do, I convinced myself that I needed to work harder and faster too, which risked both my health and the quality of my work. Typically, it was the latter that bothered me the most. Eventually, I had to accept the fact that I could only do so much, and thus returned to a more workable pace. The overtime, however, has continued ever since. Unless those recruitment agencies find a more intelligent batch of monkeys, I don't see that ending any time soon.
By the time I'm ready to leave work, most people have already gone. My floor is empty, and the rooms downstairs are dark. Some nights there's still somebody in one of the studios. It's a busy time of year, and one or two put in extra hours where needed to keep on top of things. Others make use of the flexible working hours to sleep in during the morning so end up leaving later anyway. Not tonight. As usual, I'm the last one to go. By that point, the main office doors are locked up and shuttered, so I have to make my escape through the factory. I leave the churn of the massive printing presses behind and step out into the night. It's already dark and at least as cold as it was when I left the house this morning. For a little while, I'm grateful of my coat, but I already know I'll soon be boiling in it if I survive the walk to the station.
Arriving on the platform, I watch the other trains come and go while I wait. I stand beneath the yellow glow of an overhead lamp, listing to the susurrus hum of the overhead cables as the carriages glide beneath them. At the other end of my journey, I have an evening of reading planned to grant me some much-needed escapism. With any luck, I'll soon be engrossed in a world where people have more to do than me and where the author knows how and when to use the word urgent and mean it. Until then, I wait quietly for my train, think about my day and die a little inside. I barely found so much as a hand-hold on the mountain today. It will still be waiting for me tomorrow, looming over everything I do. In my head, I can already hear the scream.