Bitterness

Today I am bitter. Very bitter.  Its was a whole sequence of events that led to me feeling like this – feeling like I want to give up on people, hate them forever and wanting to go live on a very secluded island.

I hate that my skills and my knowledge have become invaluable.  That I’m only judges on the colour of my skin. I hate that people first fight, before asking both sides of the story.  I hate that I can work hard for whatever I want, but others have a sense of entitlement.  I hate that it’s because I work hard, people walk all over me.

I hate that I’ve never in my life felt like this, but now it consumes me.

It’s this feeling of not wanting to believe in people – even though most of the time I’d like to see the magic.  It’s finding that your half full glass is actually half empty because of the colour of your skin.  Its feeling like whatever I’ve put in, up to this point isn’t good enough because I’m not the right colour. 

It’s watching a project going wrong, knowing what needs to be done and not being able to do it.  It’s getting the phone call, saying please help, when the project has finally hit the fan. 

My mentor, a guy with more patience that I’ve ever seen, will tell me – if it wasn’t for other people’s screw ups, we wouldn’t have a job.

Fair enough. 

I can crises manage, and have managed several projects back to normal after the fan-episode.  But I’m tired of not being ‘good’ enough to manage the project from the start, but to only help save it.

Hopefully, in heaven, we won’t see colour, but we’ll celebrate the magic that happens when wanting, willingness and skills combine.  Because, as far as people go, yep – I hate them for now, but they do come with a certain bit of magic. 

But for now, I like animals better. They don’t talk back.

Nights

I dressed a little nicer this morning – not my usual, very casual attire. I knew today was going to be one of those days. A long one. A difficult one. And one that I would hate to remember.

Turns out: I was right.  14 hours later, we’re still pushing the deadline.  It went from better to worse, to even worse.  And everybody is freaked out, frustrated and so over it.  We’ve been pushing this deadline now for 5 days – with very little thought put into this process, its one of those “feel your way around it”. And lets make the same mistake seven times, as if we haven’t learned anything from the first six times. 

I want to blame someone.  Two weeks ago I made a big issue about the way I thought its going to turn out.  Almost everybody ignored me saying I was getting worked up over nothing – fortunately, my worry stems from a similar situation three years ago where we almost moved the world 20cm every single night.  And that carried on for eight months, and by the time the project was done – so was everybody involved.  But no, Im worked up.

As I walk down the same corridor for the 17^th time I think back on the many, many, many nights I spend doing this: crises managing, meeting (almost) impossible deadlines and cleaning up messes.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the thrill of making something almost impossible work.  I like meeting a deadline and Im good at crises management.  But, I don’t want to spend all my nights doing this…

I want to plan something and have people work as a team, in order to meet the deadline.

The chain is just as strong as its weakest link.  Blame game – at this point – not much help. Best now is to find a solution.  But I know what went wrong; I know the link and Im wondering how to solve it, to prevent the same thing from happening next week.

We have this saying in my home language, you can bring a donkey to the water, but you can’t make it drink.  We can try our best to enable, support, guide and assist people but we cant do their work for them.