An analogy for most of my waking moments.

[catsidhe]

The thing with having a Remedy queue hovering at 45 jobs, with new jobs being pushed at least as fast as you can pop them, is that the thing becomes like a stagnant pool of sewerage, with a clear layer on top. The first layer is cool, clear fresh water, where the client is happy if you get to them quickly, and just as often easy enough to fix. But. The ones you can't get in time sink, far too quickly, until they enter the Dead Zone, that great swathe of jobs just off screen, after the first 8 which is all Remedy will show you in one screen. Rapidly aging, the clients behind them getting more and more angry, the jobs usually put off in the first place because they are badly described, or the client is uncontactable, or the job, you know, will be long and difficult and painful and thankless. This is past the thermocline. Now you're not in clear water any more, it's scalding hot, murky sewerage. Even looking at it makes you ill. And looking at it does nothing but make it fester more — there is nothing for it but to hold your breath and stick your arm in up to the shoulder. Knowing that by doing this that you're leaving the fresh jobs to fester themselves. Knowing that the more you grope around down there, that you might pull up a blockage, or you might slash your hand open on a jagged, rusty, tetanus-laden, diseased piece of metal: almost impossible to move, let alone remove, and only getting worse by the day. You promise yourself, every day, that tomorrow, tomorrow, you'll make the time to gird your loins, hold your breath, and get to that thing, and every time you watch the clock tick over to five PM again, and think back over your day, and can account for every minute, and not a one spare enough for this. And when you do just reach in and grab it, it turns out to have been a bear trap smeared in shit the whole time, and it's just been fermenting, ready to take your hand off at the wrist. And you still get the impression, somehow, that it's your own fault for letting it get that bad, even though you have no idea what more you could have done, from which black hole you could have pulled the requisite extra four-hour blocks of time.

Can you tell how much I'm loving my work right now?

The only saving graces are when I can manage to solve a problem, quickly and easily. When I figure out what was wrong at the root, and a swathe of issues all go away at once. When a client actually is grateful for what I've done, and impressed at my skill at doing it, and it's not some n00b expressing wonderment and my knowing how to bring up and use the command line in XP.

But mostly it seems like dredging through foetid shit with my bare hands.