Sabattical Indicated

Recognizing signs of burnout.

I periodically take breaks, generally due to noting symptoms of burnout in myself. Having really been through the wringer on this in 2012/2013 time frame, I broadcast the particulars of what I’m experiencing, hoping some of you will avoid the things I faced, which took years to abate even after I stood down.

Each of the last five months have featured a major hit and I’m a different sort of ragged now, but I’m going to employ the same solution.

Attention Conservation Notice:

We are all of us, no matter how hardened we might believe ourselves to be, still human. Pressure builds up and, like a submarine below test depth, things start to creak and groan. If you’ve already got this ritual down, just move along …

Signs & Symptoms:

The last five months have been just nonstop. Cardiac scare (Oct), post election collapse of all the things and Texas court(Nov), intrusion and more collapse(Dec), intrusion remediation & Texas court(Jan), and another bout of COVID(Feb).

The typical first tell when I’m edging into burnout is someone sharing something horrible, and I respond by chuckling. The bridge was crossed in late November, but intrusion remediation gets done where and when it’s needed, which consumed two months of my time. The last five days of January/first five days of February I put in about 160 hours. I am not built to take that kind of abuse.

Fetching up COVID positive five days after that was the cherry on top. I’ve learned that if I push on past inappropriate chuckling I’ll get weepy, which wasn’t the case in 2012/2013, but my life is quite different now.

So enough of that nonsense, it’s break time. And if this is all brand new to you, Recognizing & Remediating Burnout from last spring is the place to start.

Quiet Time Queue:

Break time for me is about avoiding negative stimulus. I have a number of projects ahead that are

• Looks like I am going to do this other thing, job wise, and if it works it’ll refill my designated Peruvian peso purse. I don’t have anything to learn on this one, it’s just doing an old, familiar thing in a new place.

• The MikroTik radios and Raspberry Pi computers are here, they still need to be whacked around until they do what I want, instead of what I tell them. That’ll take some doing.

• There’s been a walk in request for some attribution involving the Inter-Planetary File System. I just cold refused this as impossible, not wanting to waste money, but they’ve insisted I explain why it’s not possible. Now I’m eyeball deep in IPLD, IPNS, DNSlink, and every system I control is running IPFS+tshark.

I’ll probably have something to say about the latter two when I feel rested, but given that I’m just wobbling out of a COVID episode, that may take a good long while.

Conclusion:

I guess maybe Mourning Mankind might explain why I’m more saddened than inappropriately amused by what I see around me. Since then I’ve seen a couple things that, if we can manage some Richard B. Riddick escape moves, as a species, might get us through our date with The Jackpot. Maybe. But certainly not all of us.

If I were inclined to quit I’d have been dead in a blizzard eighteen years ago. Instead here I am, eighteen months into a new lease on life, after sixteen years of endless slogging through chronic post-Lyme stuff. Maybe I’ll be a trifle less maudlin when I eventually return.