Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

So I was talking with a coworker about a difficult situation I had with a manager years ago. It came down to how to interpret the company rules. The issue was about schedules and not being allowed to modify those schedules permanently. Say always leaving at 3pm on Friday every week kind of thing.

It came up because I wanted to work through my lunch to make up an hour. So my manager went pouring through the company rules and found this one phrase "you are not to modify your work schedule on a continuous basis". I was like what does that have to do with me working through lunch. He then told me that would make my work schedule during the day without a break to be a continuous day. Which to him was not allowed. I was flabbergasted at how insane the interpretation was on his part. It was not worth fighting it at the time.

Back to my current coworker. We keep talking for a while and he says to me: Was that manager an adversity hire?

I have been chuckling about this all day.

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

That time when you are taking about personal projects with other developers and their past frustrations come into the project discussion all of the sudden. Like, I just wanted to communicate about this great idea I got with other developers, not about how it cannot be done, or how someone else thinks I cannot get it done. I can stand this happening the first 1000 times, but not the next 10000 times.
I feel that this happens to other people as well, but there is just no talk about it anywhere.

When a child experiences extreme adversity, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, neglect and trauma; There are two possible outcomes.

1) Drug abuse, addicition, financial problems, depression, anxiety, isolation, bad grades and unemployment, early death or suicide.

Or if the child manages to survive, go past the adversity:

2) Become a superhuman. Experience entertainment, happiness in small things even more. Utilize dissociative identity disorder by achieving mental and physical prowess by false yet true belief of the persona.