I generally am very happy with my work. My job includes a mix of techno-geeky tasks, all related to the delivery of “rich media” (streaming, podcasting) content. The group I’m in has less than 20 people, and within that group my immediate team consists of four or five folks who design and build applications. But the group I belong to is part of a very, very large company…the best of both worlds, I guess. Some days I am writing server or application monitoring programs to keep track of the state of our streaming infrastructure, other days I’m working on a data model for the next generation of our webcast delivery interface. I never feel like I’m stuck in a rut, the work challenges me mentally, and I am surrounded by people who give a damn- that’s saying a lot.
Another part of my job is performing “operational” tasks for webcast events for our company. An “event” for us is something like the presentation of quarterly financial results and the like. The work I do for these events isn’t particularly technical- I do things like convert charts into web-ready form, custom configure a website to present the material, and control the “visibility” of the content during the event itself. It is more about precision and careful communication than about being really “smart”, and usually this is a good break from the more technical work I do. I also have an extremely good customer within the company who is appreciative of what we do for him.
All of this is leading up to a bit of whining from me. I am dead on my feet…well, I’m sitting down, but whatever I’m on, I’m dead. My employer put on a huge event on the other side of the world that was accompanied by a webcast that I was involved in. The last few days are a blur: between Sunday at noon and Wednesday at 2:00 AM, I managed to get about 8 hours of sleep- doing the math, that’s about 50 hours of work, 4 hours of driving to and from the office, and 8 hours of sleep in a 62 hour span. Yeah, I know: lots of technical people work like this every week for years on end, but not me- it’s not in my nature to work around the clock.
Today I’ve basically been in a daze. I’m still not exactly sure what day it is. But I’m taking tomorrow off, so hopefully by Friday I’ll be back to what passes for normal around here…
You better be back to normal, I’m expecting you bright and chipper on Saturday… no wait, that isn’t “normal” for you or me… never mind 😉
I’m actually feeling quite a bit better today- a good sleep helps.
I’ll see you on Saturday- although “bright and chipper”? Not likely 🙂