It is a simple thing. Go to work, come home. Keep everything in line. Life is a bit different with a newborn and even more so when you have a non standard job. I define non standard in that I’m an Island Tech, think  embedded  journalist who fixes things. Most places have IT departments, and so do we. In my case it is a great huge department, but I am that department’s lone  representative  in this area. And as a lone support person for a department sometimes things get a little hairy. I love my job and the challenges it can bring but there are times where things get rough. You cannot make everyone happy all the time.

I used to have a fish tank in my office, helped me deal with the mental fatigue. Just look at this fishy after someone came in to yell. Fishy didn’t care. He was busy being a fish. It was my job to be busy making sure the department ran correctly.

The primary problem with being in IT is the perception of what it is that you do. Computers are magic, and are capable of magical things. When someone requests a problem fixed, or a task completed unless the answer is right away problems can arise. The second problem with IT is that not every action you do to fix a problem  necessarily  looks like you are working on a problem. Data needs time to process, OS’s take more than a minute to install, and files take a while to transfer.

I’ve talked about my  need for a fidget before. But i came up with a new fun activity to take the idle cycles out of my hands while waiting for magic to happen. I whittle. No corncob pipe, no flannel. Just an exacto blade and a block of wood. It usually takes a while get things done right. This right here was my first creation, now no matter what happens you can never say I was up a creek without a paddle again!

What do you do to think out a problem? How do you spend the down cycles waiting for magic to happen?