Busy doing nothing

Now I come to think about it, I may have used this title before.

But it's fitting for this post, in fact it's fitting twice!

So... What has been going on in the time from my last post?  Not much.

We have a date for the dormer windows (end of October, keep you fingers crossed for dry weather :S) and after that someone will come in and make a couple of rooms out of the attic, and then I paint all of the walls and put down a nice floor (OK, an Ikea floor- but they look nice ;p).

Then we just have to move everything from the current study / spare room to the two rooms upstairs and start to decorate the nursery.

And we have about a month to do everything. No problem then. :)

Other than that it has been work and sleep. The VDI machines that I was complaining about before are now our everyday machines.  And we have issues everyday. At present I am working at about 50% productivity as the machine just doesn't let me do more than that. After three weeks I had had enough. I was not sleeping well, stressing every hour of the day about the fact that work was piling up and not being done because the machine just didn't let me.  Issues appear, stop, and come back. And no one knows what the causes of the issues are and so they are not getting solved.

At one point I was in the car and just wanted to turn around and go home rather than fight the machine again.  I have the agreement with my boss about being able to take a days vacation when I just can't cope.  The problem is this wasn't a personal problem where I just needed to reset, this was a problem caused by my work machine and so I don't want to use vacation day for it.  After all, the next day the problem is not going to go away...

In the end, and after a talk with my boss, I just tried to stop caring. The machines don't work and if you accept that, and accept that you can do 4 or 5 hours of normal work a day then the stress does go away a little. Click, wait 30 seconds and then try the next click (or type or whatever).

And I am not the only one. Even a colleague who always just said it's fine with a shrug is getting as down as I am. He has the same issue. What should take 15 minutes can take 1/2 hour or more and it is affecting him outside of work as well.

Friday was actually fun though. After 4 hours, 4 reboots (each of which take 15 minutes minimum) and the machine just not working when it was booted I was waiting for the machine to start again reading my ebook (you have to do something rather than watch a screen) and one of the IT Services guys walked in and asked how my machine was.  The response of "I'm reading a book" did make everyone in the room laugh (except the guy who asked the question).  He offered a possible solution to my problem (and was surprised when I said what he was offering had been tried 4 or 5 times previously).

And screwed up my computer even more. I spent the next couple of hours trying to get the settings back to to what they were. The most interesting was that Friday was my handover day for a weeks vacation.  That didn't happen. And I didn't stay late to do it. If I had judged the time poorly then I would have stayed.  However, after spending 4 hours reading because the machine isn't working I am not going to put in overtime to make up for it.

All in all it sucks.  I still love my job, I just don't want to do it on those machines.  We'll see what the status is when I get back in a weeks time.

So yes.  Stress in the office, and an evil 7 weeks of too much work, and no machine to do it on.  I needed a break even if it has only been 7 weeks since my last vacation.

We had a choice of taking last week off, or this week. As the company weekend away was last weekend I thought that this week was better.  Get very tired, and then take the week off to recover, rather than take a week relaxing and then do a tiring weekend and go back to work :)

So doing nothing at work, and this week doing just as much at home.  Maybe a trip to a zoo to make some more photos of the animals, but other than that we have no plans.  And we hope to keep it that way!

Right, time to drink a coffee, watch the British Superbikes who were at Assen this weekend, and then a run I think!