Monotony

I think deep down, what bothers me the most about the typical 8:00-5:00 grind is the monotony. But it's a different sort of monotony then what people generally think of. A monotonous situation is generally considered to be one that is boring or tedious, but not generally stressful. I think I have a monotony of stress, it's not a lot of stress, it's just the same amount... forever. One would think that eventually I would acclimate to the background stress, but instead the opposite is happening. It becomes increasingly annoying, like someone snoring when you're trying to sleep. It didn't used to be this way, there used to be periods of relative calm punctuated by the occasional massive crisis. There is no relative calm anymore, there is rather a constant background noise of millions of voices crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced. Wait... that's Star Wars. Anyway there is no peace.

I don't mind the true crises, they're actually engaging and I always feel a sense of comraderie with the rest of the IT department, but as a counterpoint to that I would once like to take a vacation and not have some crisis at work come up that needed to be dealt with. You can ask anyone who's been on vacation with me, that hasn't happened in a long time... Of course there's all the normal kind of monotony as well. Showing up at the same time every day, having the same meeting every morning, working in the same cube, having the same arguments, etc. And it's actually this more mundane form of monotony that triggered this thoughts. I was driving to work this morning and I realized that as I waited to make a left turn into the business park where my work is located that I was right behind the exact same subaru I was behind yesterday. I don't know exactly why this was depressing, but it was.

Anyway that's enough whining, and for those of you who missed yesterday's epic entry because it was posted so late, go back and read it, it's much better than this one.

Bill Murray, sage of our time