Stressy work

Wow - haven't posted for a while, I've been SO busy at work and got myself into a load of stress. It all started with me being assigned to learn about a new system and take on support for it and it's been really hard as it's written in a different language to which I'm used to and is designed in such a non-logical way. Imagine reading a book but each page is in a different volume on the shelf and there's no index to the books, so you finish one page and then have to search around for the next one. That's what it's like trying to follow the code and understand all the parts of the new system. It's horrible!

So I began taking on work to fix bugs with the system and do support for it and it's been so hard as I just find it really hard to understand what's going on. So some of the work hasn't always worked and some has had to be re-done. And I'm constantly asking for help with it which is really hard. I know it's hard when you have a learning curve, especially when it's a steep one but I began to feel like I was constantly not knowing what I was doing and constantly asking for help and getting things wrong.

So my confidence took a real beating and I was in quite a low place about work. And then I got given another piece of work to do - which was back on my old systems and to be honest is a really nice piece of development work. Except it has a ridiculously non-movable deadline and has been estimated with very little analysis or design done on it. So I was supposed to have completed development in 14 days, and that was around 4 weeks ago!! It's ridiculous! Any other time I would have loved this bit of work but I just feel like I've been badly beaten up by the previous work and so am finding it hard to get to my feet to do it. Self confidence is very battered.

So I am rather stressed. Actually I don't feel so bad this week as my work is coming together at last but at times over the last 9 weeks I've just felt like walking out and a couple of times have had tears in the loos. I had a one-to-one with my line manager a couple of weeks ago and I told him I was stressed, but what can he do? He was asking me what would help and I just didn't know and as I don't report to him for my day to day work he can't really do much about the work I'm assigned. It has been hard.

BUT on the positive side, I decided to look up a new yoga class as I thought this would help. My last one finished as the teacher moved away over a year ago so I found another one, about a 10 minute drive away. I was so excited!! I love doing yoga and I really enjoyed the class, it seemed like a friendly non-competitive one and so hopefully it will be really good for me. I felt my whole body tingling during relaxation and especially my face so perhaps that's all the stress coming out of me. I hope so!

Anyway, wish me luck for tomorrow as I'm hoping to get a colleague to peer review all my code so that I can check it in ready for test. We then have precisely one week before a serious code freeze as it has to go in with a big program release in December. So any bugs found in my code in test and it could be serious stuff for the whole program - which HAS to go in on 18th December, come rain, shine, gales or snow..no pressure then - eek!