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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

THE FIRST DAY BACK AT WORK

Steve Cole reports: in our company, everything is focused on Origins. That's when key new products appear, and it's the biggest (sometimes only) road trip of the year. We got home a week ago and I have spent most of the last week de-stressing, doing some stuff at home, moving my files to a new (larger) hard disk, and cleaning the clutter off of my desk.

So, 7 July became "the first day back at work" for me. Leanna has been slaving away on mail orders for three straight weeks and Steve Petrick (who takes stress better than I do) worked most of last week, but did duck out for a movie or two. For Mike Sparks, the warehouse has been busy for months. For Jean Sexton, she's home from Origins and busy proofing files for new products.

Since the start of this year, I have worked to clear out the backlog of unanswered Email, unanswered questions, unreviewed submissions, and unprocessed reports. I made a lot of progress, but had to put that on hold during all of June due to Origins. Now, I'm back at work and will resume the march toward eliminating the backlog and keeping current.

Over a period of years, I have gotten steadily worse (health, work habits, attitude) but this improved over the period before Origins when I had to do things I haven't done in years (things I let Steve Petrick take over, but he was too busy on Module X1R and the delay of "my" Origins product to September left me with time on my hands). I got back to some fun, basic, game design and creative stuff that I used to do, and enjoyed it. The Terror Werks alien combat run at Origins (a live-fire combat exercise) pumped me so full of endorphins that it was the catalyst for a long-developing change in my attitude. I will, as of the moment I shot the seventh alien and had a real world Army airborne ranger colonel tell me how well I had done on the mission, no longer accept that what IS has to be the way things WILL BE.

Sure, I'm fat. But I can start exercising and go on a diet. Sure, my health is bad but I kept a month of blood pressure records and have a doctor's appointment to change my (no longer working) medication. Sure, the office was a mess, but I already cleaned it up. Sure, doing stuff around the house means fewer naps and less television, but it felt darn good to hand-scrub the cook top for Leanna and to go dig up the bricks that the tree roots were pushing up and cut out those roots. Sure, I had to delay watching Ice Road Truckers for a few hours but I did take a long walk around the neighborhood and felt better for it. Sure, it's been EASY to let Leanna deal with the gardener (when "outside the house" has been my job since I got married 30+ years ago) but I spent an hour with him this morning on my hands and knees doing soil tests to find out just exactly what is eating (and ruining) my lawn. Sure, I let Steve Petrick do 80%of the driving on the way to Origins but I did fully 40% of it on the way home. Most of all, I have simply decided to stop feeling sorry for myself.