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[nenjin]

Time to complaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn.

Be me, on a week long work trip. Always stressful in and of themselves.

Last night of the work trip the room next to me at the hotel is talking loud enough I can hear them through the walls. It starts and 10:30pm and they talk until almost 2:30 in the morning. Whether they finally went to bed or it was me hammering on the wall with the heel of my boot that finally silenced them, I don't know. All I know is I pass out around 2:30, and wake up at 6am for the last day of the implementation.

I work an ~11 hour day of talking, training, fixing data, being the face of the implementation. Trying to stay positive and upbeat and be accurate for the sake of the client's perception, despite wrestling with exhaustion and brain fog.

My flight out of Utah isn't until 8:30pm.

I make it back to town about 1:30am.

I go out into the parking lot at work to my car and find someone has damaged my side view mirror. It's not fractured or shattered but they scratched the paint on it real good. I bought my car brand new in 2021, and over the course of a couple years it's been dinged, scraped and scratched at least 6 times in that parking lot. If I count all the door dings and scratches I've picked up there, it comes out to about 1 a year over 11 years. There are so many random people coming and going at work that half of it is from asshole college students who fuck your shit up and then leave because they're just there to buy coffee. There's no one to hold accountable, there never is. Just another "perk" of where I work.

I finally get home about 2am and find my cat has puked up a mighty pile right below my computer chair.

Things always seem at their worst when you're tired. So yeah, after being awake for nearly 20 hours running on 4 hours of sleep, I'm feeling mighty shit on by life. It could be worse, for sure. It can ALWAYS be worse. But I immediately am going to turn around on Monday, train a brand new employee while all my other teammates are on vacation for the eclipse. With a brand new customer who I've promised responsive service and has at least 5 things we need to get done for them this week. And a week's worth of work that wasn't getting addressed while I was gone. On top of all the daily business that is going to happen. It's going to be murderously busy and once again I'm going to need be 100% on my game and maximize every minute of the day.

I'm a pretty hard chargin fella. I like staying busy and being motivated and kicking ass. But my tank is nearing empty. And all this other little life shit just further depletes me. I would like a real win that isn't just "the new client is happy." Like a raise. A nice long vacation that isn't just "hey spend half a week driving back and forth to see your grandma or family." Or just something actually good happening for me.

[McTraveller]

Oof!  I'm assuming you are keeping your eyes open for other opportunities? Or even actively pursuing them?  That sounds egregious.

It's not worth killing yourself over any career.

[nenjin]

Not really. I've had these feels for most of my employment there. The tradeoff for having to be 120% of who I am a lot of time is work is also very flexible. A lot of employees barely clock 40 hours a week. If I need time off, I take it, almost no questions asked. No dress codes, no KPIs, no one breathing down our necks about breaks or time off for life stuff that needs to be handled. I come in between 8:30 and 10:00 depending on what's going on. I'm actual friends with about 70% of the company.

And we're moving toward employee ownership of the company as well, if my CEO decides he's ready to move on from the business he started and relocate to Europe to set up a base of operations over there. If I stay with it, in a couple years, I may be in the #2 or #3 position of the company, and go from Support Manager to Director of Operations. Assuming we keep succeeding, and I can keep a handle on my stress.

There's lot of opportunities and I am largely the master of how I want things to go. I get to set the tone for my department and hold people accountable and create the kind of team I want to lead. There's something to that. I like being the sharp point of the spear because it jives with my personality and work ethic.

On the flip side though....there are days where it all feels like too much and yet not enough, and I somewhat fantasize about being middle management in a larger corpo organization where I don't feel quite as responsible for everything around me.

[hector13]

Eclipse day, I get to see 80% occlusion.

Or I would if it weren’t for horizon to horizon cloud cover.

[Akura]

Similar experience. Went to several different places in the past few days to find eyewear to watch the eclipse. Nobody had them. All sold out. A library the next town over was giving them out, but refused us because we don't reside in that town zone despite that library being in the same library group as the one closest to us. The closest thing we found was +$40 glasses at Home Depot which are labeled to block 99.9% of UV light, but that was +$40.

We did manage with a pair of some kind of welding goggles, by overlaying both lenses over one eye and covering the other and sharing it. And then it wasn't a total eclipse anyway and I have spots in my eyes now.

[nenjin]

Frankly an eclipse that isn't in totality is kind of a waste of time.

Nothing really compares to that few minutes of totality.

[hector13]

I did get to see a teeny bit of it about an hour after “totality”, or the most occlusion I’d get. Little chunk out of the corner. At least I know the glasses work.

[MaxTheFox]

Frankly an eclipse that isn't in totality is kind of a waste of time.

Nothing really compares to that few minutes of totality.

"A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky."

[hector13]

I would have to agree with that. Even at 80% occlusion, there wasn’t really much of a way to tell if the dimness was because of the moon being in front of the sun or all the clouds.

[nenjin]

Weirdly it looked darker from the inside looking through windows, probably because of some treatment on them made the light condition more noticeable. Going outside, nah, still pretty normal.

The shadows on the other hand were pretty cool for the effect it had on them. About as close as you can describe to someone what tripping looks like.

"A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky."

Above 90% isn't what I'd call a sunset. It's pretty unsettling. But fair point, I've never been directly underneath it.

[Eric Blank]

What I remember from 2017 was definitely "cool sunset" territory. Couldn't take the day off to travel for better viewing.

Totally on the wrong side of the country this time.

[McTraveller]

I took a 3hr road trip to go see it yesterday; it was literally right over a friend of mine's parents' house, so we didn't even have to fight for parking or anything.

If you ever get a chance - I'd recommend it.  I've had high-percent-but-not-total before, and I can say, there really is nothing like totality.  I can see why ancient people had such a response to it.

Imagine a sunset on fast-forward... and then you're looking at this crazy canonical sun shape, but with a black core and white corona rather than the orange/yellow nonsense.  We could also easily see Venus and Jupiter.  I'm pretty sure we also saw a solar flare, as there was a distinct red gleam in one spot.

Wildlife is also very confused, we were on a canal and the birds were going nuts.

[Jopax]

Work related upsets leading to some shitty sleep most likely leading to a long and shitty day at work and off it.

Where you get handed a shit sandwich when you arrive, you try your best to salvage it (and I'll be first to admit there's things I missed and could've done better in retrospect, but the end result wouldn't have been that much better, polishing a turd and all that) and then get chewed out by the person responsible for assembling said shit sandwich in the first place.

On a logical level I understand the distribution of blame here and know I shouldn't be that upset about it, but fuck me when you're exhausted it's hard to think like that :V

[nenjin]

Can relate. Either I'm the one that designed the shit sandwich I have to eat, or I designed it for someone else to eat. That said, I try not to throw people under the bus for things I staged.

Nothing like being sick and signing into work and immediately having 4 people trying to talk to you at the same time. God I wish I could be one of those "feet up on the desk" managers sometimes. But I doubt I could live with myself that way.

[lemon10]

Just lost my ancient newgrounds account when they made me confirm my old email address (that I haven't used in 15 years) and didn't let me sign in.