Filled with Rage

Recently work has been VERY tough.

Here's a quick outline of HOW tough:
I was hired to manage ~500 laptops in one building, ~175 laptops in another and bring an over-arching technology management philosophy to all of the buildings in my organization unit (staff management, develop a centralized budget, etc).

Less than two months after I started working I was dumped a third building with ~350 laptops on me AND a hostile environment to work in because the person who left had wanted my job and did not get it... resulting in MANY people in that building having negative feelings toward me without ever having met me.

Rough math based ONLY on what I have listed above shows that, 2 months after I was hired, my job increased in workload by 52%. I got no pay raise.

Combine that additional workload with the fact that ALL of the equipment is an additional year older AND a last-minute decision dumped an unexpected 7.5 person-weeks of work onto my department and you can see why I am filled with rage. Everyone wants 100% service with only 25% manpower.

How am I handling this? Badly. I am filling with more and more stress each day and I will continue to do so until the last of the laptops have finished with their annual servicing and are no longer needing to be queued for the work.

I will continue to be over-stressed until I can move into the phase of the year where I can work on trying to streamline and improve the work flow for NEXT year's annual service.

There are three things I am trying to do to manage the stress right at this moment:
1. I am writing about my problem in an effort to vent out some of the stress.
2. I am planning to watch some cached sitcoms (How I Met Your Mother is fantastic - if you have not watched it you MUST).
3. After I watch an episode I will take the dog for a walk to the nearby Stone Cold Creamery store and get an ice cream.

I am also planning to have a talk with some of the people further up the chain to explain to them that a 52% increase in normal day-to-day workload PLUS the added project that they thrust upon us at the last minute is the reason that we are having such significant problems keeping up with the demand of the other employees. I will also point out that we're ahead of the schedule laid out last year in the buildings that I was SUPPOSED to be working on from the point that I was hired.

And, of course, I have developed some plans for how to fix things... and am working on other improvements, too.


The morale of today's post: rage happens; how we deal with it is what makes or breaks us. I am trying to deal with mine in a constructive manner (mostly - ice cream doesn't really count) because it is what is best for me and for my users in the long run.

Let's hope that the people further up the chain see and acknowledge my efforts (AND that I was unfairly given a 52% increase in workload less than 2 months after my hire date).