Okay, this is going to be a scattershot post. Deal.

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Work is just. not. easing. up. I work in a software group. We provide software for an online service, but we still have shipping schedules. The biggest difference is that my customer is another team within my company: the operations group that takes our software and provides it as a service to paying customers.

I'm the release engineer. Basically, what that means is that I sign off of each release from software to operations. I don't have to test every last bit - that's why we have a large test team - but I do the packaging and review the documentation, etc.

The past two weeks, the rest of our test team have been working on planning for the next big release. Me, I've been meeting with our customer and reviewing the release procedures document, etc. I've not been getting home before 8PM, save one day I had to be home early so I basically took it as a half day.

I'm fried crispy.

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Work. Even when I'm not at work, I think about it. I can't stop. Either it's analyzing where bad events could have been averted, or it's planning for the next release, or it's anticipating bad things for the next release, or...

I haven't been blogging because my head never shifts out of work-mode. Usually, I drag my tired body home, do the eat + chores + talk to SpouseKitty a bit thing, then I end up in bed trying to go to bed. I'm so stressed that I have insomnia, so I curl up to a good book, such as Windows PowerShell in Action.

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PowerShell will save me, I hope. At work, I had to step in for someone with nine years of experience with this product. Nine. Years. In that I'm able to fill those shoes, I think that's a major achievement.

Not to my boss. Each year, we get compared to others in our pay grade and job title. I'm near the bottom. It's not that I don't work hard. Everyone knows that I do that. It's that I'm not able to make myself shine.

My last job was very team oriented. It was a different company, a different culture. I made sure what I worked on was reliable, well-documented, and the internal customers liked it. That was enough to be patted on the head and told, "Good kitty."

Here, that's the starting point. That's just the ante in the poker game. In addition to maintaining the status quo, I'm expected to make things better. That's fine, but I'm expected to make things better than my teammates make things better.

Actually, I can draw from my roleplaying game experience in this regard. No, not the cliche of, "my character did this in that situation, so I know it will work." I can separate my reality from my alternate reality, thank you. In this case, it's how to strategically work in this sort of environment.

The game was Amber, and its major claim to fame was that it was utterly diceless. Your character had four attributes, and that was that. If you had to contest someone else in a fight, you used your Warfare attribute. Whomever had the highest attribute score, won. To keep things interesting, no one knew each other's scores, but you did learn to hazard a guess after a few failed contests. The only variable was how you described your character's actions to increase hir odds. How s/he cheated, in other words.

After seeing this (and a few other nuances immaterial to this discussion) I realized this (and all other RPGs) were nothing more than contests for the game-master's attention. S/he who had the highest attribute score in a given area could push the party into situations where that attribute was most useful, so s/he had the spotlight.

The up-front way to compete was to push it to where your character's attribute was high. Out of the four attributes, no one could be highest in all four. Figure out where your strength was, then play to it.

The sneaky way to compete was to define other areas besides the rather broad domains already described by the four existing attributes. By hitting others where they don't even realize is a valid avenue, you're more likely to gain the advantage.

Same here. PowerShell is the next DOS, the next .bat and .cmd scripting. No one else on my team knows PowerShell, so my plan is to work on it, make it shine, then use it to shine. Because it's such a different language than C#, it has much different features and capabilities. Thus, I need to determine where it's strongest in competition with other languages, then apply those strengths to my current job.

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Yeah, this blog entry is all about work, too. What did I tell you? My mind is all about work, nearly all the time.

I wish it were different.