In(tro)spection
It's been awhile since my last post, of course it is. I don't have the time or willpower or energy on weekdays - I haven't had that for a long time - to do anything other than quickly browse Facebook and play a short Flash game or two before sleep, and my weekends are just as tiring and full of things to do - errands to run, cleaning to be done - and somehow I simply never get around to a few personal projects I've been putting off forever.
But this week has been particularly bad, so I'm putting it down because getting the words out might help me fix a perspective on it and calm myself down. Well, not this week in particular. If I were pressed, I'd say it's been the entire past... two months or so, with the past couple of days as the cherry on top. That's how long I've been away, hasn't it? It's been an exhausting time...
Well, we'll begin with November then. November itself wasn't so bad; I had NaNoWriMo going on, and I managed to beat it (though the novel itself remains unfinished and it's one of those projects I'll mean to get around to but never do and eventually forget about). I also travelled down to Singapore for my first-ever Thank Goodness It's Over party, which was quite a lot more fun than I'd thought it'd be. But somewhere around the end of November and the beginning of December, my direct superior got pulled out of the department and put onto a new project the company is doing - which means I had to take over his duties.
Let's be clear from the outset that I'm not assigning blame to any party; at the time it all seemed like a good idea to all the parties involved.
Between April to November or so, I had been in charge of the laboratory. It wasn't too bad apart from the times we had to rush out something or there was a breakdown or other similar issue, which would then cause a mad scramble. I'd also started taking on additional responsibilities, very very slowly - one of those being a document that is quite ridiculously information-dense and needs to be prepared in various forms about eight to ten times a day, every day, and our target is zero errors per month (which we haven't yet achieved) - and one or two other things. But now I got a number of other things added to me - manpower management and production issues and various documentation/ procedural things and all the other stuff that comes with being an assistant manager.
It's been a wild ride ever since; every morning I sit down at the table and the emails and phone calls and meeting invitations (ha! What a name for them) come in and the next thing I know it's 9pm or 10pm and my mind is sore and tired and bruised from everything I have to deal with, and then there's the next day waiting to pounce on me. I won't lie by saying I enjoyed it; I could probably say I foresaw it - I've never, at least, had an exaggerated opinion of my own abilities - but I hadn't expected, in any case, for it to be so tiring. Maybe I'm just young and inexperienced and not very good at taking care of myself, let alone of others, or my mind is not properly trained, or I lack the sheer willpower or force of character - but it's just been such a challenging time... and I hate challenges.
Anyway, that became the routine for the past month-plus. I would wake up on Monday morning to my shrill alarm and force myself through a cold shower and go to work and get out of the office at about 9 or 10 when everything had quietened down sufficiently for me to wrap up the to-do list for the day (and move everything that hadn't been done to the next day's to-do list) and put a bit of consideration into the next day's schedule - do this, and this, and this - no, wait, that should come first - and then this - maybe concurrent with this - and then I'd go back and go on Facebook and talk for a bit and then fall asleep at about midnight, because my circadian rhythm still hasn't gotten used to the idea of waking up before nine. This would repeat every day with minor variations and end on Friday evening when I'd go off to the weekly Friday-night young adult meeting at church. Then on Saturday I'd wake up at whatever time I did, and then it'd be laundry and sweeping and mopping and errand-running and lunch and swimming and then maybe dinner, if I'd gone through particularly great exertion, and then games and reading and sleep.
(Speaking of reading, I'm currently on Tim Harford's Adapt - which seems frighteningly similar to another book I've read, but I can't find another copy of the same book anywhere. I wonder if I've read it before, somewhere else, but not bought it?)
Sunday has church, which is by now pretty nearly a full-day affair, and then after that there's the house where I potter around and eventually sit down and accept the fact that the weekend is over even if I don't feel particularly rested, and make myself go to bed because Monday is coming again.
My theme song these days is eerily similar to what it was, back in the days when I did Purchasing - Big Bad World One - specifically, the line "What if the best that I can be just isn't good enough?/ Isn't it better not to know?" - interspersed from that song from the Harry Potter movies (which, I think, is based on a much older saying) - "Double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble/ double, double, toil and trouble/ Something evil this way comes!" Which, I suppose, really tells you all you need to know about my general mood in the office.
It merely got worse on Wednesday night.
This past week, the MD's son (whom I know from a family trip a few years ago in Beijing) has been coming to the office to try and learn what the company does. I've been helping out as best as I can, given my limited understanding and availability; but on Wednesday night it so happened that I had to entertain him for some time until his transport came to return him to Singapore, where he lives. And so we remained at the office until eight or so, as I was going through some paperwork, and then we went out. He had mentioned earlier that he was in the middle of taking driving lessons, and the week before his father had mentioned (I presume he was joking when he said it, but I take things much too literally sometimes) that it would be nice if I let him practice on the car (which is a particularly durable one - so it wasn't that unreasonable a request) and so we went to a nearby construction site that looked from the outside like a large empty space.
It was pretty okay, apart from being ridiculously bumpy, up to the point where the car fishtailed and we got out to find that there was quicksand halfway up the rear right tyre. The rest of that night was a blur of calling for help (which came, but was ineffective) and then his parents and my GM all showing up at the house at the same time, and all of them being incensed at the events.
It was here that my personality betrayed me. I'm... not probably normal in the way I respond to crises, I don't think. For one thing, I've trained myself for a long time to subdue emotional responses, especially to unpleasant events; and I've also got a taste for schadenfreude; and (this is the crucial bit) I tend to balance emotions - which is to say, I'm depressing (or at least very repressed) when around happy people and borderline manic around unhappy people.
And on that night, I was around five unhappy people (I wasn't, myself, unhappy as such yet - I hadn't yet allowed the weight of the events to sink in). And boy, was I ever borderline manic. I probably crossed the line into full-blown mania with the way I was laughing (in what, I think, was meant to be a reassuring it's-okay manner - I, unfortunately, am not a naturally reassuring person) and it came across very badly.
Suffice it to say that on that night, Things Happened, and the aftereffects have been happening ever since. The car is still dirty all over, and needs a wash; there are mud tracks on my floor from the people who tried to help, as well as myself; I have muddy clothes that I'll have to beat the mud off before I clean them; and apparently, to every adult who's heard of it, the immediate response is to chew my head off about how irresponsible and immature I am, how badly things could have gone wrong, how incredibly foolish and dangerous the whole thing was, and essentially that I'm not very much of a good and reliable person at all with the way I fail to consider things before doing them. Oh, and of course, that I don't have very much common sense at all.
I'm split in my mind about the whole thing, myself; I do see their point of view, of course. This risk-taking behaviour is risky, and dangerous, and if not curbed quickly, could lead to much worse things; and it was certainly illegal. In fact my boss has gone on to say it indicates a failing, or completely absent, moral compass - which apparently only appears in pampered people who have never experienced hardship. (I haven't the foggiest if my life counts as a pampered one. I certainly don't think so; but maybe my mind has turned out along similar routes.) It's ended on a very depressing route at any rate...
(Which makes me wonder if my True Neutral stance on these things might be more a liability than an asset.)
But what comes next? I haven't any idea. I suppose the idea is to show that I've learned my lesson and have become able to consider the consequences of any action before taking it and so on and so forth - how I'm supposed to show that, on the other hand, I don't know. And a bit of reflection tells me that this trait is both blessing and curse... if I were the kind to never go into a new situation without full and complete information and a total confidence that it would end well, I shouldn't be here at all. I wouldn't have gone to Singapore - a land that I knew nothing about at the time - to study bioengineering - a thing that, even after graduation, I find difficult to explain to people - at NTU - a place I knew nothing about and knew nobody in. I would almost certainly not have come to this company, preferring the dismal situation I knew to the fearsome unknown of this place. I don't think I would have done half the things I've done that have brought me to the person I am now; many of them were foolhardy things to do at the time and were risky. And I've certainly done a lot of things that went against common sense and some of them turned out well and some didn't; but it's probably different when it's real life and when it's a board game. For one thing, real life can't be just folded up when you're tired of it and stowed away in a cabinet to be forgotten until the next time you want to have another go at it.
So, again, I don't know. Maybe the lesson is to consider the risks - but then the above examples from my past come right back and tell me that if I'd known all the risks, and been able to consider them from a fully adult perspective (whatever that might be; I certainly wouldn't know), I probably wouldn't have taken them... I suppose in the end, the lesson seems be that risks are only acceptable in hindsight, if they turned out well. Which isn't much of a lesson at all. Or that risks are only acceptable if there is no method of lessening them; or that more information should be gathered before trying anything out. Or maybe that I'm not a very functional adult, even if I am more than a quarter of a century old, and I don't have a Manual on Adulthood to go by.
...I suppose I am embarrassed, and ashamed that such a thing happened. I'm not about to go telling the world about it, at any rate, so it's not something to emblazon on shirts and stuff. But (perhaps this is the anthropic principle at work in my head) I also don't think it's as bad as everybody makes it out to be, because we all came out of it intact apart from dignity. (Not entirely - I have a small cut on my toe and another on my finger, but both seem to be healing and uninfected.)
I'll just wrap this up here; this constant second-guessing of myself and my attributes and how I should deal with the faults that other people complain about will never end. I don't even know how I should solve it; certainly people may say that they'll always be available to listen, but... heh, let's face it. When I'm a walking r/wtf, I'm highly unlikely to actually take anybody up on that offer. And besides, I'd second-guess them too - I don't even know myself, and I've got 20-odd years of experience in that; how likely is anybody else to?
The next morning I called on a tow truck to help; the truck driver looked at the mud and refused to go in there. So I asked for help from a nearby excavator, and it hooked up a chain to the car and towed it out; then I used a nearby high-pressure water sprayer to clean it off, mostly, though there are still mud streaks over it.
But this week has been particularly bad, so I'm putting it down because getting the words out might help me fix a perspective on it and calm myself down. Well, not this week in particular. If I were pressed, I'd say it's been the entire past... two months or so, with the past couple of days as the cherry on top. That's how long I've been away, hasn't it? It's been an exhausting time...
Well, we'll begin with November then. November itself wasn't so bad; I had NaNoWriMo going on, and I managed to beat it (though the novel itself remains unfinished and it's one of those projects I'll mean to get around to but never do and eventually forget about). I also travelled down to Singapore for my first-ever Thank Goodness It's Over party, which was quite a lot more fun than I'd thought it'd be. But somewhere around the end of November and the beginning of December, my direct superior got pulled out of the department and put onto a new project the company is doing - which means I had to take over his duties.
Let's be clear from the outset that I'm not assigning blame to any party; at the time it all seemed like a good idea to all the parties involved.
Between April to November or so, I had been in charge of the laboratory. It wasn't too bad apart from the times we had to rush out something or there was a breakdown or other similar issue, which would then cause a mad scramble. I'd also started taking on additional responsibilities, very very slowly - one of those being a document that is quite ridiculously information-dense and needs to be prepared in various forms about eight to ten times a day, every day, and our target is zero errors per month (which we haven't yet achieved) - and one or two other things. But now I got a number of other things added to me - manpower management and production issues and various documentation/ procedural things and all the other stuff that comes with being an assistant manager.
It's been a wild ride ever since; every morning I sit down at the table and the emails and phone calls and meeting invitations (ha! What a name for them) come in and the next thing I know it's 9pm or 10pm and my mind is sore and tired and bruised from everything I have to deal with, and then there's the next day waiting to pounce on me. I won't lie by saying I enjoyed it; I could probably say I foresaw it - I've never, at least, had an exaggerated opinion of my own abilities - but I hadn't expected, in any case, for it to be so tiring. Maybe I'm just young and inexperienced and not very good at taking care of myself, let alone of others, or my mind is not properly trained, or I lack the sheer willpower or force of character - but it's just been such a challenging time... and I hate challenges.
Anyway, that became the routine for the past month-plus. I would wake up on Monday morning to my shrill alarm and force myself through a cold shower and go to work and get out of the office at about 9 or 10 when everything had quietened down sufficiently for me to wrap up the to-do list for the day (and move everything that hadn't been done to the next day's to-do list) and put a bit of consideration into the next day's schedule - do this, and this, and this - no, wait, that should come first - and then this - maybe concurrent with this - and then I'd go back and go on Facebook and talk for a bit and then fall asleep at about midnight, because my circadian rhythm still hasn't gotten used to the idea of waking up before nine. This would repeat every day with minor variations and end on Friday evening when I'd go off to the weekly Friday-night young adult meeting at church. Then on Saturday I'd wake up at whatever time I did, and then it'd be laundry and sweeping and mopping and errand-running and lunch and swimming and then maybe dinner, if I'd gone through particularly great exertion, and then games and reading and sleep.
(Speaking of reading, I'm currently on Tim Harford's Adapt - which seems frighteningly similar to another book I've read, but I can't find another copy of the same book anywhere. I wonder if I've read it before, somewhere else, but not bought it?)
Sunday has church, which is by now pretty nearly a full-day affair, and then after that there's the house where I potter around and eventually sit down and accept the fact that the weekend is over even if I don't feel particularly rested, and make myself go to bed because Monday is coming again.
My theme song these days is eerily similar to what it was, back in the days when I did Purchasing - Big Bad World One - specifically, the line "What if the best that I can be just isn't good enough?/ Isn't it better not to know?" - interspersed from that song from the Harry Potter movies (which, I think, is based on a much older saying) - "Double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble/ double, double, toil and trouble/ Something evil this way comes!" Which, I suppose, really tells you all you need to know about my general mood in the office.
It merely got worse on Wednesday night.
This past week, the MD's son (whom I know from a family trip a few years ago in Beijing) has been coming to the office to try and learn what the company does. I've been helping out as best as I can, given my limited understanding and availability; but on Wednesday night it so happened that I had to entertain him for some time until his transport came to return him to Singapore, where he lives. And so we remained at the office until eight or so, as I was going through some paperwork, and then we went out. He had mentioned earlier that he was in the middle of taking driving lessons, and the week before his father had mentioned (I presume he was joking when he said it, but I take things much too literally sometimes) that it would be nice if I let him practice on the car (which is a particularly durable one - so it wasn't that unreasonable a request) and so we went to a nearby construction site that looked from the outside like a large empty space.
It was pretty okay, apart from being ridiculously bumpy, up to the point where the car fishtailed and we got out to find that there was quicksand halfway up the rear right tyre. The rest of that night was a blur of calling for help (which came, but was ineffective) and then his parents and my GM all showing up at the house at the same time, and all of them being incensed at the events.
It was here that my personality betrayed me. I'm... not probably normal in the way I respond to crises, I don't think. For one thing, I've trained myself for a long time to subdue emotional responses, especially to unpleasant events; and I've also got a taste for schadenfreude; and (this is the crucial bit) I tend to balance emotions - which is to say, I'm depressing (or at least very repressed) when around happy people and borderline manic around unhappy people.
And on that night, I was around five unhappy people (I wasn't, myself, unhappy as such yet - I hadn't yet allowed the weight of the events to sink in). And boy, was I ever borderline manic. I probably crossed the line into full-blown mania with the way I was laughing (in what, I think, was meant to be a reassuring it's-okay manner - I, unfortunately, am not a naturally reassuring person) and it came across very badly.
Suffice it to say that on that night, Things Happened, and the aftereffects have been happening ever since. The car is still dirty all over, and needs a wash; there are mud tracks on my floor from the people who tried to help, as well as myself; I have muddy clothes that I'll have to beat the mud off before I clean them; and apparently, to every adult who's heard of it, the immediate response is to chew my head off about how irresponsible and immature I am, how badly things could have gone wrong, how incredibly foolish and dangerous the whole thing was, and essentially that I'm not very much of a good and reliable person at all with the way I fail to consider things before doing them. Oh, and of course, that I don't have very much common sense at all.
I'm split in my mind about the whole thing, myself; I do see their point of view, of course. This risk-taking behaviour is risky, and dangerous, and if not curbed quickly, could lead to much worse things; and it was certainly illegal. In fact my boss has gone on to say it indicates a failing, or completely absent, moral compass - which apparently only appears in pampered people who have never experienced hardship. (I haven't the foggiest if my life counts as a pampered one. I certainly don't think so; but maybe my mind has turned out along similar routes.) It's ended on a very depressing route at any rate...
(Which makes me wonder if my True Neutral stance on these things might be more a liability than an asset.)
But what comes next? I haven't any idea. I suppose the idea is to show that I've learned my lesson and have become able to consider the consequences of any action before taking it and so on and so forth - how I'm supposed to show that, on the other hand, I don't know. And a bit of reflection tells me that this trait is both blessing and curse... if I were the kind to never go into a new situation without full and complete information and a total confidence that it would end well, I shouldn't be here at all. I wouldn't have gone to Singapore - a land that I knew nothing about at the time - to study bioengineering - a thing that, even after graduation, I find difficult to explain to people - at NTU - a place I knew nothing about and knew nobody in. I would almost certainly not have come to this company, preferring the dismal situation I knew to the fearsome unknown of this place. I don't think I would have done half the things I've done that have brought me to the person I am now; many of them were foolhardy things to do at the time and were risky. And I've certainly done a lot of things that went against common sense and some of them turned out well and some didn't; but it's probably different when it's real life and when it's a board game. For one thing, real life can't be just folded up when you're tired of it and stowed away in a cabinet to be forgotten until the next time you want to have another go at it.
So, again, I don't know. Maybe the lesson is to consider the risks - but then the above examples from my past come right back and tell me that if I'd known all the risks, and been able to consider them from a fully adult perspective (whatever that might be; I certainly wouldn't know), I probably wouldn't have taken them... I suppose in the end, the lesson seems be that risks are only acceptable in hindsight, if they turned out well. Which isn't much of a lesson at all. Or that risks are only acceptable if there is no method of lessening them; or that more information should be gathered before trying anything out. Or maybe that I'm not a very functional adult, even if I am more than a quarter of a century old, and I don't have a Manual on Adulthood to go by.
...I suppose I am embarrassed, and ashamed that such a thing happened. I'm not about to go telling the world about it, at any rate, so it's not something to emblazon on shirts and stuff. But (perhaps this is the anthropic principle at work in my head) I also don't think it's as bad as everybody makes it out to be, because we all came out of it intact apart from dignity. (Not entirely - I have a small cut on my toe and another on my finger, but both seem to be healing and uninfected.)
I'll just wrap this up here; this constant second-guessing of myself and my attributes and how I should deal with the faults that other people complain about will never end. I don't even know how I should solve it; certainly people may say that they'll always be available to listen, but... heh, let's face it. When I'm a walking r/wtf, I'm highly unlikely to actually take anybody up on that offer. And besides, I'd second-guess them too - I don't even know myself, and I've got 20-odd years of experience in that; how likely is anybody else to?
The next morning I called on a tow truck to help; the truck driver looked at the mud and refused to go in there. So I asked for help from a nearby excavator, and it hooked up a chain to the car and towed it out; then I used a nearby high-pressure water sprayer to clean it off, mostly, though there are still mud streaks over it.
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