After having 90 minutes to soak in, this Craig Hughes thing is every more spookily relevant and absolutely true. My company is having one of those Friday afternoon beer bashes at 4 PM, so I'll leave at 3:50 PM. I just plain don't feel like sitting around looking at people like I'm happy to be here. God help me, and God help Craig. h requisite cash influx and my wife isn't pregnant) the issues he raises, the lying in bed on the verge of tears because the way things are differs so dramatically from the way you want them to be, that's me right now. I highly recommend reading this piece for anyone whose current situation is not their desired one. Excerpt:

I need to stop trying to heat many pots i the hope that one might start boiling, and instead just turn the heat off and live with the lukewarm. But I can't bring myself to do that. My mind is rebelling against itself, I understand what the easy path would be, but cannot bring myself to follow it. I find myself wondering if this is how most people think of their jobs, have most people resigned themselves to this shit? Is that why I'm having so much trouble being able to actually get anything done, because everyone else I'm dealing with has already given up trying? What percentage of the world's workforce behaves this way? Is this an economically healthy thing? I can understand cerebrally that some measure of institutional conservatism is vital to avoid chaos, but surely things can be conservative without being so oppressively unchangeable.

I've been trying to play it kind of cool with my workplace discontent in public places like this, but I believe it has reached the point where it is undisguisable. I just resent having to spend my days in a way that is so patently useless. The main reason why it is useless is because my particular workplace absolutely always lives in a state of emergency. Some customer has an issue, everyone drop everything. We have decided that the sales engineers are going to get a release tomorrow, everyone drop everything. Someone asked for a feature, get it in tomorrow's release. The notion of a roadmap, of things we know we are going to do but not yet is a foreign concept. More than all this, though, is the feeling that all my input is being redirected straight to /dev/null. Presumably they hired me because I know what I'm doing, yet every time someone asks my opinion they ignore what I have to say. I see things go wrong every day that I suggested ways to prevent. This is what Craig was talking about - do I fight that with all the energy I have or throw my hands in the air and say "Oh well, perhaps y'all ought to start listening to me." A year ago, it was more the former and now it is pretty much always the latter. I don't like giving up, but on the other hand I don't want to use up my personal energy and raise my blood pressure for them anymore. A few months ago when giving blood at the Red Cross, I had a pressure 30 points above my previously highest recorded one. I'm not willing to blow a gasket for this place, so as much as I hate it I choose to withdraw the very thing that makes me a good employee because my employers are being such poor stewards of that resource. How sad for them.