Thursday, July 12, 2012

a day of self discovery

Yaya adapted to her school within a week. She walks to her classroom by herself, doesn't even say bye bye to me in the morning! In the evening, she will obediently go home with me. She is in the childcare for 11 hours, mondays to fridays. I ferry her to and fro everyday as well. So far she has only been out of school for one day because of a diarrhoea. The school wash the kids' hands every hour, so I would say I had a relatively stress-free life. (stress = yaya sick + i need to take leave)

Every night we repeat the same routine. Shower, eat dinner, sit around and watch us go about our household chores, then we will give her a milk bottle, leave her in her room, shut the door, and she will sleep. As yaya is now in childcare, as opposed to previously being at home, I am now able to focus better at work. When yaya was at home, she slept late, which made me more tired in the day. Now she sleeps by 9 pm, so I get more rest. So I am an advocate for childcare lol...

As she has been very obedient with her sleep routine, I had been able to do more reading at night. I realised that I had been a little outdated in terms of technology. Recently I had been reading up on google analytics and RSS feeds as I cannot understand the terms my users use lol. She knows google analytics and RSS feeds more than me, I felt that I had to keep up. I was also reading up on databases. In the past, I relied a lot on my DBA to tell me what I need to know, now I don't have that luxury, my DBA is a DBA, database administrator, not a database designer, not a database architect, not anything else, just an admistrator who executes scripts, and day to day operational tasks.

It was only after 3 months, did I manage to convince the infra guy to upgrade my database. 3 months ago, I complained that the memory usage is >70% and requires upgrade. He said it's no cause for concern, and it's due to settings. Fine, I  let him change his settings, he insisted that we must monitor for 3 months, fine, I can wait, the moment 3 months was up, I asked him, so is it more than 80% now? He said, close, not yet 80%.

Work wise, more work, that's something expected. But what's new? Being told that I can still do my own work in my project's user requirements gathering sessions. I was quite pissed off when I heard that, but I am quite sure he wasn't thinking, as he is prone of that. It started with a very harmless question from my supervisor:

Him: How's your work now?
Me: Tiring. I spend an average of 2 half days every week on the user requirements gathering for the xxx project for the past 3 months.
Him: But you can still do your own work when you are in the meeting right?
Me: I wish! Not one time did I ever have that luxury, every meeting my user and vendor are arguing over the scope.
Him: Then what do you need to do?
Me: Decide what is to be done.

That was one week ago. This morning, one of my bosses asked me what type of work I do for my projects. I never really thought about it because my supervisor calls it operational issues, but he drilled down further to the specifics, that was when I realised that everyday I am always arguing with people because I was deciding what should and should not be done. For me, it is a very subconscious activity, I can easily tell people yes or no, to the extent where I feel that I am hired just to argue with people, but that's basically what I had been doing in my previous job as well, which I didn't realise, because it was so natural that I didn't know that I was making decisions.

Another point brought up this morning was that my bosses were talking about themselves "trivialising" work, e.g. saying a certain task is simple, or can be done very quickly. It never occured to me that they were "trivialising", because I saw it as not paying attention to what's going on.

Once in a while, conversations like these make me discover myself.

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