Today someone told me I was being really quiet. I just smiled a smile that didn't reach my eyes. I'm assuming they noticed, since they asked if everything was okay.
I'm trying to learn to balance the need to be in control at work with the need to stop keeping all my feelings inside. At home or with friends it is a lot easier to trust that I'm allowed to be human. At work I have a boss who thinks I get emotional over things that I don't care a bit about and pretty much doesn't want to hear my opinion ever.
I've pretty much stopped trying to pretend I'm okay when I'm not and I have a bit of trust for the person who asked, so I honestly answered, "no". The thing is, there isn't anything this person could do to make me any closer to okay, that is completely between me and someone else.
I've arranged to take tomorrow off from work. Not that it will give me much time to myself since I have a dentist appointment, a doctor's appointment and I need to get my oil changed, but I won't be in the office and since the source of my angst will be out on Thursday, I'll have two days free from that stressor.
It's ironic to me that when I supposedly missed a ship date, that I got 3 paragraphs detailing how I screwed up. When it came out that I had actually delivered everything on time and the owner had chosen to hold off until the following workday to deploy the function, the only thing I heard was, "I'm not going to spin this, we're just going to eat the negative press." Of course, we translated to you, meaning me. We just had another large deliverable go out yesterday and today we got an email from the same person that had two sentences. Those two sentences said you guys worked hard, but this is only the beginning on making the process work in the long term.
To me that's a backhanded slap disguised as praise. As we went through the post-mortem on the last delivery, my boss said, "We made progress, but it isn't going to get any easier soon and I’ve bought stock in Pharmaceuticals just in case." I know I'm being sensitive at this point, but that comment was WAY out of line.
The fact is that as a result of the BS that has been going on around here, we've all had to make adjustments. Of course now that we've managed to do "good" once, we can't screw up or we’ll be back at the bottom of the hill to catch all that rolls down it. Oh wait, we're still at the bottom of the hill. To make things easier to go forward, the team is being thrown into complete flux. We get to keep three real developers and a contractor. We're loosing two developers and gaining one, but how soon the new one will be able to make any contribution is unknown. If his last transition is anything to go by, check back in July.
Enough for now, I'm going to go take my angst out on a defenseless volleyball.