utopia, 23 september 2026

this week is trying to kill me

First off, I am not suited to get up at seven am. I learned this years ago. But I have to get up at seven am on days when contractors are coming to the house because, as already noted, contractors arrive at the crack of dawn (eight am) and I need to be caffeinated and showered and dressed before then, if for no other reason than to spare them the sight of me walking around the house in my ratty bathrobe. (But also because, frequently, once they get here and start working, the bathroom is inaccessible.)

On Tuesday I did the whole get-up-early thing and then we realized they had an emergency cancellation and weren't coming that day, so I got up early for nothing. I would have just gone back to bed, but by then I was already up and dressed and trying to go back to sleep would have 1) been an abject failure and 2) would have just wrecked the next night's sleep even more.

Nonetheless, I did need that rest on Tuesday (as did our Junior Cat, who is having anxiety attacks nonstop because she really does not like strangers in her home or disruption of any kind, and she's had more than a week of plenty of both), because I was injured and I needed the recovery time.

See, I was scheduled to attend one of our periodic team meetings -- which are supposed to be in person -- on Tuesday. Because the contractors were supposed to be here on Tuesday and the spouse would be largely unavailable if they had any questions or needed supervision of any kind, I didn't feel I could leave the house. My boss, who is also my co-worker (it's complicated), understood this, and was fine with my "I can probably attend the meeting remotely, I just may have to duck away every so often." (We always have a remote setup for these, because one member of the team is in Portland.)

My grandboss, who is the CIO, threw a fit. OK, it was a very polite fit, because he's not a yeller and he's always polite, but it was no less passive-aggressive for that (actually, being polite about it makes it more passive-aggressive, I think). Of course he didn't complain to me, that wouldn't have been sufficiently passive-aggressive. He complained to my boss. Who doesn't need that kind of pain; he makes her life hell anyway as it is.

He was like "no, everyone who can attend should, it's very important," yada yada ... and rescheduled the meeting. Which was probably painful for everyone involved, since getting all ten of us in a room at once is always complicated. I'm sure I'm going to be made out to be the villain here. (My boss thinks I'm worrying about it too much; she says everyone else knows how much of a pain in the ass the CIO is, and they won't think it's a big deal.)

The thing is, while these meetings are never a total waste of time, my presence in person is absolutely not required. In fact, my presence is almost never required, period. I am probably the person who has the least need to be at these meetings, except for the limited value of occasionally glimpsing my ugly face. (They would not see it in Zoom calls etc because my laptop's camera is permanently broken. Mysteriously, every time I get a new work laptop its camera immediately breaks. Must be the vibes.)

The CIO is comparatively new. He's been here about two, maybe three years now (time has no meaning), and he had the misfortune to have replaced my former boss, who basically originated the role and who was there for something like thirty-five years. Hard shoes to fill. He's a nice guy mostly, and I don't dislike him as a person.

But I have definite ideas of what a CIO in this particular peculiar environment should do and be: He should leave us all alone to do our jobs, except when we need him to intercede for us with the upper echelons. He is supposed to run political interference for us and for IT's needs. That is his entire job.

What he actually does is make paperwork for everybody. He is, shall we say, very process-y. He likes strategic plans and documents and spreadsheets and metrics. And my boss/co-worker, whom we badly need as a developer, has been almost unable to do any real dev work for more than a year because he is constantly filling her time with reporting bullshit.

He has a a strategic plan he wants us all to contribute to. We have all ignored it. He asked us to contribute. We ignored it. He begged us to contribute. We continued to ignore it. Several of us suspect that in this upcoming meeting he is going to scold us all about not contributing to it. He can go suck sand. That document is not our responsibility. It's one of the few things that's entirely on him; it was his idea, he can damned well do it himself. (And for the record, rumor is, the last time he presented one of his grand documents to his boss, said boss was visibly nonplussed and was like "great, what do I do with this?")

My thinking is he behaves like this because he's worried someone is going to come along and ask what he's getting paid for. That he constantly generates reports to prove he's actually doing something, and that he insists on in-person meetings (mind you, only a few a year, and as I say, they're never totally useless) so that everyone can see that he's actually doing some management of some kind. Because, honestly, we run just fine without him except when we need to try to beg someone for more money, and that doesn't matter because no one is getting money for anything right now.

Anyway, on Monday morning I just about exploded. I had, for whatever reason, finally reached my limit with him. I agree that this seems like a very trivial straw with which to break the camel's back, but that's where I was. I told him directly that he should not reschedule the meeting on my account, and got back the polite "everybody should attend" line. And only the fact that I need the money, especially in the face of sixty thousand dollars of home renovation costs, and that I am the sole source of health insurance for this household, stopped me from then quitting in his face.

I was on the verge of going to the office physically and going to find him in person just so I could quit in his face. Actually, the quitting was the secondary part. What I really wanted to do was to give him all the yelling he has urgently needed to hear from someone for over a year, about how he's fucking up my boss' job, making everybody's life more difficult, not really understanding the brief, etc etc etc ... but once I vented that, I think I would pretty much have to quit afterward, y'know?

Did I mention that I've been exhausted for days because of having to get up at seven fucking am (and not sleeping well due to Home Renovation Stress), and that I get real impatient with the world when I'm tired?

You're wondering when I'm going to get to the injuries.

Well, that was Monday morning, the day I didn't quit explosively but I thought seriously about it for a good half hour. I was tired and angry, and so verbally obvious about both things that both my boss and my spouse said, "Hey, maybe you should ease down for the day. Go out and touch grass."

I could not dispute the wisdom of this, so I decided to leave the house for a walk. I was going to run some errands and have some lunch. As I was walking, I tripped over something invisible -- I searched later to see what it was and couldn't find anything. Realized I couldn't regain balance, stopped myself with my hands which slid along about two feet of sidewalk. Both palms skinned and bleeding, all the fingers on my left hand jammed, shoulders unhappy with me, my already-bad right knee banged, a bleeding toe ...

I did continue to lunch. I cleaned my wounds and had a beer and a sandwich and the bartender gave me some large Band-Aids, which I felt was very helpful of her. I even managed to continue on to run my errands.

It took until Tuesday night for me to be able to move the fingers of my left hand without pain. They weren't broken; they'd just been slammed pretty hard. Meanwhile all the pain seemed to gradually be migrating into my lower back. It was stiff when I went to bed.

This morning, when I got up (at seven fucking am), I was unable to move my back in any way without sharp flashes of pain. Bending and twisting, especially. Walking upright wasn't so bad. I had to leave the house and I managed it just fine, but sitting at my desk, or especially getting up from sitting at my desk, is still extremely unpleasant, hours later (nearly six pm as I write this).

The contractors will be in again tomorrow. The other contractors (we have two sets) may be coming in on Friday. We're not sure yet. They don't like to communicate these things.

On Saturday I intend to sleep as long as my body lets me, and if anybody gets in my way, they will be risking serious bodily harm. I have had it with this week.

23 September 2026