Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

It’s been a rather terrible week; or at least, last week was. I’ve been tired all weekend just thinking about it, and having to go to work tomorrow and face it doesn’t help. I can only hope this coming week will be better, but I don’t expect it to be. Last week was the preliminary audit week (for lack of any better descriptor); our main customer sent an auditor to wander the place for three days asking questions and so I spent all of the previous week frantically trying to get everything in place. My boss had, quite nicely, set out a number of requirements and I just ticked them off as they were accomplished or at least set in place to the best of my ability. All the same it was quite frustrating seeing things happen so slowly, partly due to the strange placement of the work breaks and partly due to my subordinates not being terribly enthusiastic to finish all their tasks on time because getting to work overtime gets them paid time and a half, so assigning any task within half an h...

It turns out that I’m quite capable of going a full day on quite little sleep. At least, I’ve managed to do it today, though it’s quite uncomfortable and I don’t plan on doing this often. But then it’s not quite been a normal couple of days. It’s not even been a normal week—although, I must admit, normalcy is not a quality often found in the time that I experience. Which is a good thing according to my GM, but then his views on a lot of things are alternative to put it mildly. To put things simply most of this week has been rushing things out to prepare for audits next week; somehow every time I think we’re quite ready, I go explore a little bit and check or some issue comes up and then it turns out we overlooked something and now we have to start a whole new task. On the upside it does mean less things overlooked now than before, but the obvious downside is that I keep wondering what I’ve overlooked during the latest check. And Friday night there was a birthday celebration and the...

…and like all good resolutions, the above is broken already. I suppose I should be proud of myself for remembering to write this post in the following week, but that’s cold consolation. I’m quite sleepy. I’ve been this way for a good part of the week; very often I’m staying awake through sheer willpower and if I were to rest my head on anything and close my eyes I might very well just drop off and not wake up until somebody leaps on my head in a very exuberant wake-up call. That, if you’re wondering, is a very bad thing because the whiplash might kill me or the impact might break my spine, but then not many people have that sort of jumping ability anyway. I should probably go to sleep except I want to type this up so as to have at least one thing ticked off my mental to-do list, and besides tomorrow is Saturday. I don’t know if this tiredness is due more to the fact that I’ve been getting an average of 6.5 hours of sleep a day for the last few days, or that I, an introvert, have ...

I suppose the first of May is as good a time as any to start on new resolutions. Here’s one: I resolve hereby to write a new post every week. I used to be quite able to, and I do not think I’ve lost that faculty or that facility; but of course now I have a great many more distractions and demands on my time and sometimes it does seem as if the effort of sitting down somewhere and shutting out everything that I need or want to do and spending a half hour or an hour just remembering and recording is beyond me. I don’t suppose anybody’s been hanging on me and waiting for my next post and screaming in silent despair every day that goes by without an update; but in time to come I think it would be nice to sit down and look back and smile in indulgence at my past self. So, because I can’t necessarily say everything in between the last post and this one—mostly because I haven’t got Internet access at the moment and have forgotten when the last update was—I should perhaps spend a little ti...