Posts tagged as illness

The final two working weeks of the year. In the midst of kicking off at Bulb, wrapping up at CaptionHub, and Christmas party season… I got a truly horrendous cold and spent several days in bed. Yuck.

So there’s not a vast amount to report. My personal Trello account tells me I spent much of those two weeks when not at clients mainly just doing admin. Otherwise, I tried to wrap up one last feature at CaptionHub – as well as a bit of troubleshooting around STL file formats – and started getting my handle on the role at Bulb in the few days I had there. So far, there’s been a lot to take in, but the little team in Labs is great, and I’m looking forward to getting underway a little more next year.

When I wondered why I was ill, it turned out that moving house, a long weekend of teaching, and a new gig all at once is a lot to take on board, and I think my body just said ‘no’. Endoftermitis is real: it’s like technical debt for your body, where you can no longer stave things off and it all comes crashing down. The only thing to do is to roll with it: accept you don’t want to get colleagues ill, do what you need to recover, remember that’s what the rainy-day funds are precisely for.

A quieter end to the year than perhaps I envisaged, then, but an end nontheless. Next up: two weeks out of the studio and the office, resting up, getting ready for 2019. And then we start again.

Onwards!

Week 225 was… not quite what I had in mind.

On Monday, owing to client availability, I rejigged the week to do some Longcrag work. I spent some time working on the site, and running packaging tests.

Longcrag is mainly small electronics kits. They come in a number of bags. What I’ve been doing is the work to confirm how many bags, and what goes in each bag. I don’t want confusable parts in the same bag, and I’d like to keep bag count down, and confirm they all fit in the outer packaging. So I did a dry run for one of the kits. This helped me understand some processes I could put in place to speed up making up the kits later.

It also helped confirm how many bags I’d need, and that yes, the labels I’m using will stick to the small bags just fine. And it helped me work out how to draw up packing sheets, so it’ll be easy for me to make up each small bag for each kit in bulk. A bit dreary, but now out of the way – and much better to have foolproof instructions and references for repetitive tasks, rather than forgetting or getting bored.

And then I went home, and by the time I got home, I was a shivering mess and I went to bed for, effectively, the next three days.

I mainly write about the straight up work of work here; I have a personal site for other sorts of writing. But to write weeknotes honestly this week, I thought I’d acknowledge out loud what happened: I was ill.

Not a bit sniffly, and not tired from overwork; viral and sweaty and no use to anybody. And the only thing to do is to speak to clients, who are all understanding, because they’re people too; remember why we the rates we bill should afford slack both between gigs and derisk time off when we’re unwell (because otherwise, they’re unrealistic); and work on resting properly so we can get back to work.

Back in the studio after the Easter break. Hit the reset button, carry on.