When I'm Forty-Four

Each passing year, it becomes more difficult to deal with stress and stupidity at work, and not because my brain is falling apart (which it is, but that's another story). It's simply that life is too short to put up with idiots.

Forty-four means that in twenty years, I'll be sixty-four - no doubt singing that old Beatles' song, if I'm still able to sing.

And that is the question. Will I still be able to sing? Will I still be able to play guitar? Will I even be able to walk unassisted? Or will some disease or accident take away my ability to do those things which I take for granted now?

Seems like a waste of time to spend the best part of my life at work.

There is a lot of short-sightedness at work. Plans and schedules are made as though people are an inexhaustible resource, as though it is no big deal for people to work 50-hour weeks for months or years at a stretch without cracking. But people do not live to work. They work to live. Right?

Some people apparently enjoy working too much. And I don't mean the "fun" work of making things, creating things, putting together something tangible, something you can put in your hand as a final product and say, "I helped make this a reality"; it's the other kind of work, the supplemental work of creating budgets and schedules and spreadsheets and tracking matrices and cost accounts and weekly status reports and all the little paraphenalia that is supposed to allow us to keep on track, all the paperwork that, in the end, is put away in a file and never seen again, for which they sacrifice their evenings, their weekends, their families, their lives.

It is very difficult to take those seriously, especially when the data is so casually tossed aside when its usefulness is over. Most of it is round-filed the moment the status meetings are over. And someone stayed up all night long to prepare it.

There is a long-standing tradition at most big companies to make fun of the bean-counters, those little bespectacled minions who turn over rocks to count all the bugs underneath, and have their formulas for calculating everything from the number of hairs on their heads to the temperature of the coffee in their cups. They drive engineers crazy, talking about Earned Value and Cost At Completion and other fancy accounting terms, screaming for data which they can plug into some arcane mathematical structure to produce yet more data to prove that the engineers are having too much fun at the company's expense. But that data isn't real, it can't be seen or felt or touched or soldered or wired or switched; it is transient, and thus meaningless.

Yet this data is revered as Important, Critical, a High Priority; and woe unto those who enter the realm of the Status Meeting without it, for they shall be flogged severely.

So we spend hours a day preparing our status, and more hours attending meetings to talk about our status, and even more hours revising our plans so that we can have better status tomorrow; and all the while, the product languishes in its broken state, awaiting the few spare moments we might have in our busy day to actually add some functionality or fix something that's broken or test it in the lab.

And we end up spending long hours at the office trying to fit our fifteen-hour day into a ten-hour bag, and wonder why we're so tired by the end of it.

Meanwhile, the family is at home, going on with their lives, getting older by the moment, growing up, learning, expanding their horizons, figuring out what life is all about. Before we know it, the kids are grown, the memories are made, the world has moved on - and we're still sitting at our desks, trying to figure out how to handle the latest imaginary emergency with those intangible, unreal bean-counted numbers.

This is my forty-fifth year of life, having survived the first forty-four relatively unscathed. I think I'd like to spend less of it at work, and more at home enjoying my family. There are no guarantees on life or health. And the children are never going to get younger, only older, more independent.

Now if I could just figure out a way to spend less time at work for more pay...