Frustrated

More than a month since I got a single day's break. It has been a hectic, tiring, stressful and more importantly frustrating journey. My day starts at 7am everyday and on most days, I go to bed well past midnight. This routine is particularly frustrating as I do not see others around me working their asses off. I work amidst people who are mostly chatting over a cup of coffee, spending a lot of time on Facebook, cribbing about their bosses, discussing increments and variable pay outs and above all, looking for opportunities outside the company!!! I am not suggesting that people do not work here but most do not work enough. And there are some who are made to compensate.

Unless pushed to the corner, I do not like to tell people at workplace that I have been putting in so many hours. If I do that, I expect people to understand my situation. Here, people listen to that, say 'oh, thats bad' and then say can you take 10 minutes out to do something additional? 

Yesterday was particularly tiring and frustrating. The first half was spent preparing for a 3 hour long presentation (170 slides!!!). I skipped lunch for it. The presentation started at 2pm and went till 4:50pm. Took half an hour break after that. Then started reviewing another set of documents that I had targeted to send yesterday. Found several issues and hence postponed the delivery. It does not matter as the actual delivery date is couple of weeks away. After that, I came back home and started working on some additions in the deck that was presented earlier in the day.

I was feeling frustrated as I knew that weekend would be equally shitty. In the weekend, I would be required to prepare a storyboard for a project that is starting after couple of days. I do not know whose brilliant idea was it to start a project with a ready storyboard. More often than not, the people with such brilliant ideas do not have to executive them. The project that is starting from Monday was supposed to be done by the people with the industry knowledge and they had indicated that it would take 8 weeks. After submitting the proposal, most in the project team quit the company (I wonder why!!!). Later, a new project team (including yours truly) was created and this team has ZERO industry knowledge. And this team will have to deliver the project in 5 weeks!!! Somehow, this calculation is beyond me. This is not all. There are lot of aspects regarding the project that are ambiguous. No one really knows what does the proposal actually mean....what is the proposed methodology. The people who are still around have suggested that lets ask the clients in the kickoff call!!! This would be the first in my career. We would be asking the client what is the meaning of something that is written in the proposal that we submitted!!! That is awesome. The state of affairs has been giving me a lot of stress and frustration.

Last night, while working on the additions in the deck, I started having a strange pain in my chest and left arm. I got scared expecting the worse but I did not want to think about it too much. There was no time to have a heart attack!! I continued working till 2:15 am. At that hour, no one in the Kuala Lumpur and Singapore offices were online. I got up this morning and started working on the storyboard. Noone from this project team is online!!! Spent half an hour with my daughter and I would love to spend more but that is not an option. Indeed I could have spent more time with her instead of spending time writing this useless crap. But I was feeling suffocated and had to let this out.

This is mighty frustrating. Is this worth it?