How to Recover from a Destination Reunion and Running Out of the Allergy Med

The post-activity hangover is real!  Did my best impression of an inanimate object the day after the Reunion, but this week was tough.  

#ThisEffectWasVeryDramaticDuringTheReunion

I have officially run into the dreaded "now all the things I've been trying to get moving all year are finally moving but all at the same time oh no" stage of multiple project management.  It can be really overwhelming, especially when I am acting both as a SME and a project coordinator of other people on one of the projects.  (I am historically bad at trying to fill both these roles simultaneously.)

#Please

And my allergies / MCAS stuff are eating my lunch now that I've run out of one of my allergy medicines.  The pharmacists who couldn't refill it because it hadn't been 90 days when I last was visiting home said it wasn't a problem because it is actually a cheap, over-the-counter that's been around for decades, and I should be able to just pick it up at any drugstore!  

It is not, in fact, available in Canada.  I was rationing it, and now I'm out, and it's exhausting.  Definitely just what I need when I'm contemplating how many 12-hour work days my body can reasonably handle (answer: less than 1 right at this time) a week.  And the inflammation makes me desperately long to be efficient and do it all myself and less patient with the 3x as long it takes to be training a bunch of people on the process and then checking all their work and following up and . . .  Yeah, very tired.

#CanYouSmellThem  #ICouldForLike1Second  #Glorious

My "temporary boss" here continues to basically not communicate with me at all or respond to email, but I've been keeping in touch with my various bosses at my home site.  They know more about what I'm doing than the person who works in the same building with me.  Which is unfortunate because I encouraged them all to meet, and they decided the person here would be writing up my performance review that the home site managers will use in internal calibrations. Sooooo . . .

In positive news, the previous manager who more or less caused all the shenanigans due to incompetence seems to have really taken that situation as a wake up call to educate herself on how to be a better manager.  Since she wasn't getting that training and mentoring and help from the company, she's been out listening to podcasts and reading articles and talking to other managers in the company, and she's decided she'd like to take one more crack at actually keeping me after this assignment is over.  She can't promise anything, but it sounds like she, too, is tired of losing all the good people and never trying to do anything about it.  She's thinking maybe they don't ask for what they deserve, and that's why they don't get it.  (These are things I have talked to her about over her years as my manager, but she hasn't had the desire to actually address, so YES.)

Meanwhile, my current actual manager (it's complicated, but I'll be reporting to him when I go back if it doesn't change again), when asked if he could articulate what it would look like for me to stay and be successful, literally had never thought about it.  He's always been THAT convinced that I would leave (which kind of contributed to the shenanigans).  Ugh.  But he sees his role as totally helping us achieve our career goals!  Somehow?

So maybe good news, maybe not-so-encouraging news.  Possibly progress but also teetering between cautious hope and "the wave of not-caring" of burnout that I've been fighting since my dream was with cheerful incompetence destroyed by bad management last year.

I've also failed at "mentoring" an aspiring project manager who wanted to do it himself and has just flat out been unsuccessful.  I'm not sure, but I think if I wasn't fighting the burnout, I might have had the patience to schedule time with him and make him watch me do the things instead of giving him clear instructions about what to do and then giving those same instructions next time because he still can't figure out how to do them and won't schedule the time with me to teach him.  I'm not sure, though.  That only tends to work when you're dealing with people who want to learn and be mentored, and I just didn't really get that vibe from him.  

#Still #Yuck #Whyyyyyyy

I'm taking over the project again, and we accomplished in one meeting what he couldn't figure out in 2 months of weekly meetings when he wasn't canceling them randomly.  (Not rocket science.  Just basic task breakdown of what needs to be done, who will do it, and how long it will take.)  I feel bad that I couldn't successfully teach him, and I'm hoping I have more bandwidth and patience for this other increasingly big project because my body simply won't let me do all the work myself, and I don't want to compromise like I had to at the beginning of this year with these same folks.

Too many things to do on all the projects, and I feel like I'm going to fly apart.  Or maybe we'll make it work.  Stay tuned.

#INoticedTheGiantSpidersInTheParkingBasement  #ThenINoticedOneRidingOnMyCarAndHopedItGotBlownAway

#ThenIOpenedTheTrunkAndSawOneFallInAndLieUnmoving

#ThenTheNextTimeIOpenedTheTrunkItWasGone

#SoIfMyCarBecomesTheSpiderKingdomAndCrashesYouKnowWhatHappened

I would never leave you with spiders, and since I gushed about Bookworm last time, here's a timely and unrelated reminder for the next several months and maybe all time:

#LouderForTheBackRow

Hang in there, friends!  Take those naps if you can!  And if you're a parent, keep up the difficult but good work of helping to raise humans!