I've had the desire to write more lately. I've written post after post in my head, but I have been blatantly avoiding logging on and actually putting the words out there.
I'm sure there's some deep psychological reason why, but I'm not a psychologist so I don't know why. I just know that every time I think about doing it I end up not. Even this morning when I turned on the computer to write here, the first thing I did was get on social media for half an hour to avoid it.
Maybe it's because I'm tired. The baby (who has been born since the last post I made on here and is now coming up on six months old) has an irregular sleep schedule to say the least. Some nights he makes it 7-9 hours. Other nights, like last night, he wakes every 2-4. That's tough for sure. To make things worse, the toddler has been going through sleep regression as well. The other night I awoke to him walking beside the foot of my bed with a blanket over my head after I heard the door bump the wall and I just about chucked a pillow at him before I realized it was him and not a monster or something. Most of the time, though, he just whines from his room about how he wants more milk.
Maybe it's because I'm burnt out. Work's been...well, tough lately to say the least. Despite our supply chain team working as hard as we can to source and expedite parts, we've been dealing with a lot of shortages. We've been able to get enough to meet our sales goals every month this year, but not enough to deal with the major backlog we grew in 2020 and 2021 because of staffing issues and other shortages. Production has ramped up hiring and really worked on efficiency, so even though we're producing a lot when we have parts in stock, we're running out of parts more quickly than we had in the past, and there's been a lot of down time on the production lines. It's tough and it's leading to a lot of animosity and stress in the facility. Everyone is feeling the pressure and it's starting to hurt the way people interact with each other. I've had to break up a couple of fights. I had a woman scream at me for five minutes. It's not been fun.
On top of the tension, I've been putting in way more hours than I'm used to. I would previously come in to work 5-10 minutes before the shift started to get my computer booted up and get a coffee so I could be ready for the shift. Now I'm coming in 15-20 minutes prior to shift so I can catch up on all the emails I refuse to check at home. Every morning I'm coming in to 30-40 emails from people working on second shift or just from people who don't know when to stop working and think it's OK to send emails at 7, 8, 10 at night. Plus now that I've got the "manager" title, more people think they need to copy me on emails that have literally nothing to do with me. I probably delete or file without responding to about 50-60% of the emails I receive. I proceed to spend 7-9 hours of every day in some kind of meeting. I have to find time to still do some actual work. I have 23 people that report to me so I have to spend time working with each of them. Some days I don't get to see all of them and that feels wrong to me. I leave an hour or more after the shift ends every day because that's when I've had enough time to catch up on the days' emails and get all my after shift reporting done, and also because very often there are meetings scheduled after the shift ends. I barely have time to even eat lunch anymore. Most of the time I eat at my desk. Minimum I work a week is 48 hours, and man that sounds like an easy week. Most weeks it's more like 55-60.
Between the lack of sleep and the extra work, I've been home less and irritable more, and it's put a strain on my marriage. She's not working anymore, so she's in a difficult head space as well, and between my burn out and her, idk depression/anxiety, we're arguing a lot more.
The good news is, things are going wonderfully otherwise...right? I mean, it's not like COVID is still a thing over two years later and also now there's a war in Ukraine. Oh crap. Well, at least there hasn't been 7-8% inflation every month since my son was born and my wife stopped working so the budget we made last year isn't completely useless. Oops. My employer said this inflationary period is going to be "transitory", so they're not going to make long term adjustments to their pay structure and the best I can hope for is a 3.5% raise. Thanks employer.
So long story short, I'm busted right now and I don't know really what to do about it. I'm sure plenty of other people are feeling this way, too. I'm feeling pretty powerless and because of that I don't want to log onto my blog and talk about things anymore. I'd rather just lurk on social media and look at memes. My goal here today was to get this out of the way so that I can hopefully come back soon and write about something else. Hopefully it's not six more months before I post again.
