Breaking

…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 been relentlessly surrounded by people ever since the transfer, or that I’ve been forced to admit how little I know about a certain procedure and that my lack of curiosity about it has been rather a hindrance to work, or that I’ve been in three meetings in the past three days (and five if you count long phone calls as two-person meetings) and each meeting has left me with its own to-do list (and some of those overlap), or that I’ve had a throbbing feeling in the tooth that I thought had had its nerve pulled out and I’m starting to fear that the dentist did a botched job somehow, or the little bits of drama floating around the people around me, or all of the above combined. At any rate I’m tired and want rest and solitude and a bit of quiet where I can just sit back and pretend that the outside world doesn’t exist.

That’s probably the part I’ve liked best about the transfer. As the head of the QA Lab I get to just park myself in the lab all day behind my screen, occasionally emerging for meetings or to issue orders to my lab technicians or to scribble bulletins on the new whiteboard I got for it (such a convenience that thing is!) or to run a procedure or to riffle through files, and basically I get to make it my little territory where people who enter need to show cause. Of course my back is still to the door and so I don’t always know who’s entering until they’ve entered, but a little mirror that I shall obtain should fix that. But the lab is still my little place of quietness where for the most part it’s just me and my techs, and sometimes just me because the techs get easily bored if I don’t issue orders and they drift off in search of things to do. (Which my manager is getting quite fed up with and so I’ve had to tell them that they are always to remain within sight, or calling distance—which, given that the lab is in close proximity to the production floor, is much shorter than you might think—of the lab.)

But it’s come with its own kind of stress; the lab is critical in its own way, I still need to justify my actions (and now the actions of my techs too), and you wouldn’t believe the amount of documents I wade through daily. The factory deals in air fresheners and so there are master lists of flavours, flavour components, test methods and records and forms and verification and specifications, equipment inventory and calibration and maintenance, operating procedures and safety procedures and so on and so forth; I spent nearly two days on just one SOP and there’s one more to be finished off next week, and spent most of today going through one file (which eventually was split into two files plus two small plastic folders) and linking it to its equivalent record in the system. And that’s just the paperwork, because there’s also equipment that I need to bring in to satisfactorily call the place “fully-equipped”, and tests that still need to be set up and run and cleaned up afterwards, and suppliers and other departments to deal with on the way, and on top of that I have my two lab techs who both seem to know everything and still know nothing—either because nobody’s ever told them before or because they’ve forgotten, I’m never quite sure which, but I’m making sure to explain as much as possible to them about everything I do, so that if I ever take a day off they won’t collapse in helplessness.

I think there’s definitely a streak in me that defiantly proclaims that though the mountain flee and the sea boil, by all that is within me I shall not be found unreliable. Or something like: nothing irks me more than failing to deliver; but sometimes I can’t help it. Like this week; my to-do list stretches out miles and miles and I seem to only be able to whittle at it because every now and then something comes in and upsets the whole thing and then I have to stop and wait or do something more urgent first.

Ah well.

It’s Mother’s Day this weekend; I think I shall spend it in the ancestral home, with my grandmother.