| Due to my new job and a week-end at Martha's Vineyard with my
wife and some friends, I've been temporarily "out of touch" with the
Vaxnotes scene and should be able to offer some kind of new outlook to
this whole phenomenon called noting...the problem is that I haven't
written anything in over five days and I feel like I forgot how!
As far as "burn-out" goes, I got so sun-burned this week-end
that I'd take VDT's anyday. I am currently making a move towards
batch note reads late at night though, because (as my date-stamp
will indicate) I have a tendancy to stay up pretty late doing this
stuff. Also, because I feel a need to branch out a little further
(towards ubiquity), I am hoping to be able to follow a few more
conferences this way - especially some work-related notes since I'm
now in "sponge-mode" at my new job and I currently crave technical
expertise on almost anything.
I hope by doing this, I'll be able to follow the techy conferences
by reading them in the morning (with my cup-o-tea), and reserving the
late-night hours for some good-old HR noting (live). Tonight is the
pilot test for my new batch read file which will clog the works while
it dumps all the week-end's noting into various files from among
approximately 50 different conferences. If it don't crash the network,
then I'll be able to respond to some of them when I get done reading
them (next year).
-DAV0
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| It doesn't always work.
I love my job. I work with a great group of people, and my
manager has allowed me to persue my career as agressively as
I was inclined to for over two years now. So, what wound up
taking place was a period of rapid advancement and intense
training. During the middle of this, I got married. My husband
does not share my enthusiam for my work. Now, I'm not a work-a-holic
either. I work my forty hours, and whatever extra it takes. And
most weeks, it's forty hours. Occasionally, however, there's a
VMS upgrade or a disk crash, and I wind up at work until the wee
hours of the morning. As a cluster manager, I figure that's my
responsibility. My husband feels that if I work late at night,
I'm putting my job first. I feel that if I'm not there when I'm
needed, I'm letting down a group of people who have been very good
to me in the time I've been with DEC. This is what we in the business
call "between the rock and the hard place." My husband has some
rather, shall we say, traditional views of what a wife should be
doing. Managing VAXes isn't on the list. Cooking, cleaning and
caring for the home are. Yes, yes I know I should have looked
at this before the wedding, but I felt , "how can my husband possibly
knock my success?" He could, and did. So, I suppose the point
of all this mess is that we DECies aren't always super-people.
BTW, the divorce rate in the group that I'm in is *very* high,
and they're mostly software engineering people. However, the strong
marriages in the group are *very* strong. Maybe that says something,
I don't know. I think a supporting spouse is a VERY important part
of your success both at home and at work. And if that's not there,
it creates tension, and things wind up in the situation that I'm
in now (which by now you all know about).
But here's hoping for better days....
Mary-Michael
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| Your question struck a cord with this occasional Read Only Noter,
and near burnout experiences may help. Past:
1. from college, four years heart & soul with an upstart company
that folded
2. for family's sake, next six years with a major consumer products
company (great benefits! and office overlooking the harbor)
3. out of sheer boredom and grad-school references came to DEC for
change -- four years with a group in Mfg with most of the time
traveling
4. just started a new cycle -- came to Eng. and am finding workaholism
necessary for the learning process
Outcome: my wife, a teacher, has learned that I'm never going to
Father Knows Best walking in the door every night but rather must
follow this quest for change & challenge; I've learned that the
family is so important to me that the cycles must slow down and
I must manage time.
Rationalization: we've got a wonderful Company here that provides
the opportunity to do entrepreneurial things on grand scales, but
will only succeed with well-tuned people. You've got to manage it.
(my $.02) -- Larry
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