Revival

I've been toying around with what to do with this LiveJournal now that I've moved more polished blogs on to my Wordpress site. I love the idea of journaling, and I wanted to take it up on a somewhat regular basis again, but I also didn't want to just dump thoughts onto jakebe.com. So maybe this'll be great for shorter, daily entries about life and thoughts and all of that.

For the past couple of weeks we've been hosting mut on vacation from finding incredibly small things. It's been wonderful; he's such a great guy, so full of love, and he just does nice things for people as a matter of course. His visit has been an excuse for us to be a lot more social with folks than we might have been otherwise, which has both been really fun and totally exhausting. :) The first week was pretty much full of social engagements of one sort or another, and we've only started to slow down this week. We're still hanging with people, but it's much more formless -- more of a "let's hang out and watch things together" vibe, which is somehow less taxing. Mut'll go home on Monday (all too soon), and I know I'll miss him immediately.

Work has been fairly stressful but also rewarding in its own way. We've hit the end of our quarter, so things got crazy for a little while. I work in support as something of air traffic control; I monitor incoming cases and issues to try and make sure they get to where they need to be for proper resolution. Towards the end of the quarter our account managers bring a lot of long-standing issues to our attention and press for a quick resolution so that they can make the customers happy and hopefully close a sale -- which helps out the company as a whole. Usually, this isn't a problem, but when you're dealing with the usual caseload AND a lot of other guys breathing down your neck for problems that haven't come up until now but need to be solved RIGHT AWAY, it's a bit of a madhouse.

In addition to the normal workload, I've been asked to handle a couple of projects. The biggest one is basically changing our email templates so they reflect the most current support policies, point our customers in the right direction for resolving problems and hopefully make case handling more efficient. I'm actually pretty honored that they think I'm the right guy for the job, to be honest; but the project has exposed a few worker's flaws that I need to work on. There's the ever-present time-management issue. I've gotten a lot better at making sure I use my time effectively, but not good enough. I also have to work on stress management. I'm getting to the point where I have a lot of things going on at once, and it's part of my job description to be interrupted with new stuff that I'm expected to drop things for and deal with as they arise. It's tough to get used to that -- when you're expected to manage your normal workload and there's a steady stream of stuff being added on, it's tough to know what to prioritize. On days where there's a lot of new cases, I feel like I'm running around like crazy putting out fires, but don't really have anything to show for it at the end of the day. It's a little difficult to actually *show* that I've been working if, say, things are running smoothly. It's tough to show someone how much work goes into that without, you know, calling attention to it.

I've learned that I'm not really a fast-paced person, but I'm working in a fairly fast-paced environment and I have to learn how to deal with that. It's a work in progress, and we'll see how it goes later on down the line.