Work & Sleep

I'm having trouble sleeping again. The night before it was nightmares and then unable to sleep. Tonight I went to bed early, just after 9 and then by 1am I just couldn't sleep. I lay in bed for about an hour tossing and turning til I followed the advice of a wise woman I know "If you aren't sleeping in the bed, or doing something else... then you shouldn't be in the bed." A wise thought and one that stops associating the frustration of not being able to sleep with the bedroom.

So I got up and did some work. Something that was on my mind and I really wanted to do last night but didn't have the concentration span to do. It comes to something when writing an email counts as an achievement, but it was a constructive, helpful, proactive, elegant and technically sensible one and something I probably wouldn't have got chance to do in the day with all the hassles. I know thats probably half of what was on my mind before I went to sleep as it was the last thing at work yesterday.

Work is, I think, beginning to stress me again. I know I am finding it harder to switch my mind off in the evenings, as evidenced by the lack of sleep the last few nights. We are getting into Christmas silly season with full swing. This means managers from our customer randomly coming up with panicked predictions of load over Christmas with no real idea what might happen, just demands it be fixed. Well, if there was a problem and we knew what was wanted we probably would... but with the amount of "this must be done by Christmas" projects in at the moment, something is going to have to give - and i hope its not us.

This particular one is the thorn in our flesh. Our CRM system. Since it went in to replace the previous disaster it has had "issues". Many of the code changes introduce new queries which just hammer the system. Short term fix? Throw more tin at it and make it bigger. Then the code gets kind of fixed, the performance problem goes away again and no one really addresses the issue as its "working". Til next time. Of course each of these quick fixes means a desperate rush to get it done as everything is broken. The slow time afterwards then just gets taken by other, new, more urgent projects. This one has been owned by so many managers arranging meetings which never went anywhere, taking time where we went, heard the same things, never quite knew what people thought they wanted, then went away again and went quiet as something had been "seen" to be done. People making noise for the sake of wanting to be seen to be making noise. Nothing has been achieved upto now except to nark us off.

So. Now another manager has it and he came to see us yesterday, after another round of meetings that this time we WERENT invited to. (Another fun game at our place, the attendee's of meetings change and then things get decided for the others to do, so you THINK you know what was going on as you went to some meetings, but really you don't.... its just a false sense of security). The "definition" of the problem has changed, but they try and shoe-horn in our previous comments which are not strictly relevant. All I can do? A beautifully constructive and helpful email suggesting an different possible way forward. Will it work? Who knows, but at least I feel I *did* something.