Deep Dark Depression

It's been a weird week, difficult to describe in words, and there aren't any images in the camera that come close to depicting the weirdness of it all, but there is an instinctive need in my psyche that demands some kind of creative outlet, and blogging is one way of getting it out of my system. Sorry about that.

The team was only in India for four real days of work, but those four days were bookended by long flights, so the net effect was an entire week away from home. My sense of time was lost during the third leg of the flight (Paris to Chennai), and my sleep patterns were completely destroyed; I never got more than three hours of sleep a night from Monday all the way through Friday.

Even afterward, this last week, my internal clock was messed up. Sleep would hit me like a brick around two in the afternoon, and it could not be ignored. During a dental appointment one day, having a crown replaced, I fell asleep in the chair and they had to wake me up to continue. My body didn't feel tired; in fact, the wave of exhaustion that hit me was not a gradual slump due to physical labor or lack of sleep, but a sudden, overpowering kind, not unlike that experienced when going under anesthesia.

The effect lasted all week, only lessening a bit this weekend as I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping late on Saturday. But there's still a bit of drowsiness in the afternoons.

It didn't help that there was a sense of "out of the frying pan, into the fire" at work. Tasks are piling up, and going out to India for a week didn't shrink the pile. And there are other problems that have arisen this past week which may require additional trips, shifts in activities, all kinds of changes to the way the business is being run.

It wouldn't be so bad if those changes were going to have positive results, but there is nothing in the way things have been going over the past two years to inspire confidence that the management will make the correct decisions now, so that we won't be in the same mess a year from now that we are in today.

I'm getting tired of working all these extra hours.

"A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work." [Ecclesiastes 2:24]

It's these times when there is no job satisfaction that I wonder if it is time to move on to something else. At this point in the time-line of the family, with kids in school, it would be nice to have a job that was strictly nine-to-five, the kind of job which can be left at the office and not follow me home on the laptop; the kind of job which can be isolated from the home so that the lines don't blur. Over the last few years, the lines are so blurred that I can't tell on from the other, not even on a (supposed) vacation.

I'm perfectly willing to throw away a good career (if it can be called thus) for the sake of my family, if it were possible to find such a job as the one I describe; but I'm not sure if those kinds of jobs exist anymore, the kind where one can support a family, provide financially for food, clothing, shelter, health and education, and still have time to spend with the children before they grow up and move away.

After all, it's not like the company has any loyalty toward me. When it comes down to numbers, they would not hesitate to cut me from the payroll if they thought it would serve their best interest (profit, stock price, etc.). They have little (if any) concern for the stress in my life caused by the mismanagement and bad decisions and rushed schedules and poor quality.

I'm just not sure how much more I want to put up with.