I’m talking to one of my users, who asks the status on a project, saying that she hasn’t heard from the developer (we’ll call him Developer A) we were waiting on in a month.

So I asked Developer A what was going on. He says, “I think we’re waiting on Developer B.”

So I asked Developer B what was going on. He says, “We’re done with our thing. Now we’re waiting on Developer C.”

So I asked Developer C. His response: “Oh, yeah, uh, I got held up by prod issues. I’ll work on it today.”

I feel like I just played the pass-it-on game, you know, where you whisper something into the ear of the person next to you, and they to the next person, and so on, and then something comes out the other end. “We’re working on it” went all the way down the line and became “A yak farted in Afghanistan.”

Someday I’ll write a program that can automate this, too.

I have a pretty stressful job. Generally, the result of my performance is a significant factor in the protection of billions of dollars. Yeah: Billions.

Meanwhile, back home, I have a family whose value cannot be measured in dollars. They are the reason I can work my stressful job, as well as the reason I do so; the income from my stressful job is what covers our house, car, food, yada yada.

The problem is that time, not cash, is what’s valuable to a family. And time is what my stressful job wants from me: as much time as it takes to handle the problems we face. In short, more time than any definition of a standard work-week can possibly cover.

Sure, it’s a badge of honor of sorts; if you can survive and not go apeshit while still getting things done, that means that either you’re pretty damn good at what you do or you’re a damn fine bullshit artist. Either way, you’re damn something.

I often hear about work-life balance, as companies try to avoid attrition by putting a friendly face on “we’ll pay you less to lower our demands on you.” The reality is, though, that simple economics often wins out: time is the scarce commodity, so a premium must be paid to get time.

Of course, there’s a flipside to everything. One of the great things about having a stressful job is that it’s always, always a challenge. I don’t have slow weeks or slow days. When I work, I constantly learn how to work better, and to push my skills further, because otherwise I’d drown.

One thing I fear is that if it weren’t so hard, I’d get bored. I just wish that there were a middle ground where there was a safety valve that I could use to let it go when I hit my limit.

My day started with the sound of a three-year-old boy mimicking a three-year-old cat growling at a two-year-old cat. To the cats, this was a turf war, but to the boy, this was the Best Morning Game Ever. It’s one of a myriad of signals that I have learned to distinguish from the regular alley-noise as “dammit, Ickle’s up already“.

Not that there’s any problem with Ickle. He’s your typical, quirky three-going-on-four-year-old. In short, he wakes up exactly 45 minutes before any adult in the house is prepared to wake up, has more energy than Three Mile Island, more questions than the GRE and LSAT combined, and an uncanny ability to fight off the eating of healthy food yet pack away junk food.

A typical conversation at dinnertime goes like this:

Me: “Eat your carrots, little man.”
Ickle: “But I don’t want ice cream.”

It’s as if his brain is a part of some pure-logic collective mind which has deduced already that the intervening conversation (in which he says he doesn’t want carrots and I respond that he won’t be getting dessert without eating his carrots) is useless. He goes straight to the indignant retort, for The Collective has deduced that this battle has been lost. The Collective knows that the casualties are minor, and with the right High-Cuteness Comeback, at least something with chocolate might still be achieved in the Pre-Bedtime Era.

Speaking of The Collective, it has decreed that I must assist in the Scrabble Piece Census of June 2005. Hopefully, it will allow me to return and continue my report soon…