mind

The office space, the guys with ties and suits. They all stay around me, watch me, expect from me. It’s my job to install things, to make them work in a completely new environment in a predetermined time. It’s the last day of the install and I need to have everything working now to avoid being late. Driven to improve, to assure stability only generates new issues and when problems appear for a moment I loose hope, I feel everything is falling apart and that those guys are looking at me with heavy eyes....

In the last few years I continuously battled to keep my weight under control. All the work, stress and deadlines pushed me out of balance and I had to fight it back each time. Inside I always known it’s a question of speed and volume but I could never formulate in such an applicable way. Not until a few weeks ago and I waited for so long until I would reach one of the otherwise impossible targets in order to try to write it down....

As I was sitting on a bench today in centre Athens waiting for the 8:30 meeting eager as usually to finish work thus ending up to early I could not notice the pattern of people going to work. It’s the flow of shirts, suits and ties which each morning go to their jobs. It’s the coffee can in all their hands which got my attention. Everywhere I went I have seen the same ritualistic behavior....

As many other times, I am faced a deadline. Putting together various stuff, testing, making order into a big mess to create a line of work. This is an analysis deadline, must try, must test, must evaluate, must decide upon the way to go, must write down all decisions in the form of a technical specification. It’s nothing clear, using components which won’t work, using code which won’t compile but finally a decision must be taken....

It’s now more than 16h of work for today. My mind hardly commutes any neuron. With pauses no greater than 5 minutes I have been sitting in my comfortable chair in front of my 2 computers codding, debugging, testing, software applications. I’m struggling with a fight I don’t know how to fight. I’m driven to work and to finish my tasks, to finish a work which never finishes. I’m driven to eat in order to give my poor neurons a bit more energy juice....