...

Sometimes I feel that I should stop posting here. I never seem to have anything really positive and happy to talk about, and just end up complaining about my job, my social life and my love life (and lack thereof).

I don't think it's an accurate reflection of my life or even my mental state... For the majority of time, I'm usually quite happy, though I am starting to get a little concerned about how much my current job is starting to annoy me. It's a combination of a few factors: my boss being a twat (not to me, but just in general), our workload (I'm juggling far too much at once) and our working practices (our procedures are woefully inadequate for the amount of work we juggle).

What it means to me is that I'm constantly on edge. I have deliverables pretty much every week in some shape or form and I'm running around to the very last second getting everything in place, only to repeat this a couple of times per week.

The actual work, I can handle, I think. I'm still relatively inexperienced, but the work itself is something I believe I can do. Where I struggle is the juggling of the work. My time management is usually pretty good, but my/our boss always ends up loading us with too much work meaning that the administration side of things (including preparation of deliverables) is never accounted for. If my boss has a project that's estimated at 75 hours worth of work, he'll give me a fortnight to do it (out working week is 37.5 hours), despite the fact I might already be juggling two or three other things that will eat into that time. I'm also not great at "switching" from one project to another. I prefer to work on one thing at a time. Spending an hour here and an hour there doesn't suit me at all... I'm not good at that.

I had to take a few days off this week. I was supposed to do it a few weeks ago, but an error in work meant I had to cancel the time off and go into the office to sort it out. I was at the end of my tether on Wednesday, having already worked over 32 hours on the first three days this week, only for something to go wrong with one of my projects (not my fault, but still my responsibility) late on Wednesday. I informed my boss that I'd need advice, only for him to leave the office five minutes later without resolution. Bastard. In the end, myself and Sarah Silverman co-worker ended up making a decision to pull the project temporarily until I return to work on Monday.

So for the first time in almost three years, I'm seriously considering looking for work elsewhere. I don't know if I can continue to do what I'm doing at the moment and I'm unsure if this job (software development) is as ad-hoc in other companies as it is in my place of work. If it is, I doubt I could cope there either. While I don't stress easily, I don't have the patience to run around, catching errors on the fly when there should be complete procedures in paper form for the running of the team (but again, our boss doesn't give us time to put these together, preferring to load us with project work instead). I'm not in a position to move elsewhere in the company because we're tied into our team for a period of time when we move from another team and my time's not up until this time next year (ish).

Let's see what the next few weeks bring...