Empty March

The work asked of me

I’m a floater technician for a large tech company, and I work for a notably big client. I’m keeping details vague for saftey reasons, but this client has several different hardware teams developing different products. I got moved to one of my favorite teams after assisting another team moving their inventory to a different location for about 2 months. My manager had also told me they are in working to transition me to be a permanent team member of said favorite team. I thought things were looking up for me; I was getting a bit worn down helping different teams on a moment’s notice, so the thought of a stable schedule was a warm, comforting thought.

Stability - oh, how a pipedream that was.

My first task on the new team was a pretty tall ask - trim down one of their team member’s ticket queue. I’m no stranger to ticketing systems, I’ve basically been working with them ever since I started working full time jobs. But this ticket queue was a mess. The fella had tickets dating back nearly 2 months ago, and those were only the tickets I was told to work on. He was supposed to be shipping out hardware, but he just gave most of the tickets a “We’ll get to this when we can!” message and completely ignored them. How completely useless. I chipped away at the mountain of tickets, and eventually I finished everything in his queue that I was tasked to complete. Good! Smooth sailing now, right?

Then the team’s manager had me chip at a different team member’s ticket queue.

Little did I know, a lot of tickets got sent to this person from the coordinators just above us who managed the high-volume ticket queue. And this person unfortunately had the worst of luck, getting sick for nearly a whole week and then taking off for a pre-scheduled vacation trip the next week. The work wasn’t too different, it was also just shipping out hardware.

On top of all of this shipping though, was also doing in-person customer service.

The team I was on didn’t just ship out hardware. People also picked up hardware from our physical location, and returned hardware to us. We relied on returns as all of this hardware was in a development phase, so quantities were limited. As newer hardware revisions came out, people would come and return their older ones for their new shiny toys. Older hardware was still requested from us for additional testing, but several different hardware versions just weren’t being supplied to us. We had to play an internal game of letting people know we don’t have hardware and to resubmit requests later, or juggling who gets what.

The first person I mentioned? That person was problematic for the team for a while, so that person ended up being let go after me being there for about a few weeks. The second person I mentioned, as helpful as they were, they were just not present enough what with their sickness and vacation. No fault to them at all, but trying to do all this in-person customer service and shipment was grueling and tiring.

Breaking point

That was just work.

I tried to start streaming again during all of this as well. I’ve always liked the idea of streaming, and I thought my streams were doing pretty OK. I was getting comfortable talking while by myself, and my guerilla streams and planned streams all managed to at least go for 3 hours per stream. Not all of them had chatters, but when you’re starting from the bottom, that’s to be expected.

One day, power went out in my area. But the power was out at night. It died right as I was hitting the 1 hour mark of one of my streams. OK, no biggie, I’ll just chill in the dark and go to sleep early then. I woke up and tried to turn on my bedroom lights. No power, still. Meh, I can use my phone as a flashlight. Run the bathtub water, feel it out with my feet… cold. Cold. Still cold. The water wouldn’t warm up. I sighed, forcing myself to take a quick, cold shower.

I clock in to work. We have our daily stand-up meetings. It’s cycle count time, which means individually scanning all of our hardware in stock to confirm that the hardware we do have matches our inventory system. I dreaded work now. This cycle count was going to continue for the rest of the week, and as this was a number one priority, I would be falling behind on the shipments I needed to do.

Work is done, let’s go home and, aha, empty out the fridge because the power is still out. Food’s gone bad. We have to restock. Now that that mess is done, power finally turns on.

Great, let’s stream… oh, Twitch doesn’t want to work. No matter what I tried, I could not log in to Twitch and properly edit my stream info for the game I wanted to play. Motivation drained. I’m not going to stream under a wrong category and look like a fool for it. Peers have been getting trolled for all kinds of things, and I don’t want to experience that energy myself. And since then, I’ve never bothered to fire up OBS and Twitch.

Empty march onwards

My breaking point was a week from this blog post going live. Ever since then, I find myself completely lacking motivation to do nearly anything.

This is not an exaggeration. I would get home from work, and maybe I may play a video game for an hour or so, but as soon as I was done I reverted to being an empty husk. Mindlessly browsing Twitter and reddit became my go-to way of passing time. Maybe I would have breakcore playing in the background to fill the void of my soul, but I continued to feel nothing of note. There was no sadness, happiness, envy, pain, contempt, fear. I felt alien to nearly everything happening around me. There was no desire in me. Playing video games, watching Youtube series, watching anime, watching porn, masturbating, exercising, hanging out with friends, going out, streaming, drawing, working on personal projects… none of that appealed to me in the slightest.

Perhaps I just needed to plan things out? And let that forced energy awaken somethign in me?

My Saturday was actually pretty productive, all things considered. Went for an early morning walk to get some exercise in, did my laundry, got an oil change for my car, and watched Cocaine Bear (I was curious to see it). Image picked up a small dresser for the base of my twin-sized bed so I could have additional storage. I set bought it second-hand, took it home and got it set up. And then I browsed my phone in bed for about 6 hours straight. All of what I did on Saturday was nothing special, I have had MUCH busier planned weekends than that. I didn’t plan them out to the hour, but I usually took that energy into the rest of my day and I could just wing it and work on longer-term projects. But that Saturday, despite all I did, only led me back to being a mindless phone-browsing husk.

And that continued into Sunday as well. Back to work on Monday, where I emptily march onwards for the capitalism machine that doesn’t have a single ounce of care of my being. There’s more tickets to keep solving, but hey, I’m actually catching up on my backlog! Magical!

You might think I just need a break from work. No. I’ve actually been pretty productive at work, and I always take my breaks and lunch to their fullest. And even if I did take a break from work, what would I even do? There is nothing that appeals for me.

After writing this entire blog post, I would have thought I might have awaken something inside. Nope. Still lifeless.

We’ll see when I put up another post here.