A couple of weeks ago I had an issue at work. Quite a big deal, verging on a crisis. I’ll spare the technical details however it was one of those where nobody can work and everybody is looking at you to get it fixed. A pressure moment, one of the increasingly rare times that I looked at a problem and pretty much froze.
The conventional solution would dictate around six hours of downtime, which in a business such as the one I work in is very much a matter of last resort so I cast about trying to figure out an alternative solution. Which I did; an undocumented set of command switches within the code of the system in question that let me get it back up and running in about an hour.
When I first interviewed for my current job I was asked ‘How do you deal with failure?’ my answer was ‘Wouldn’t know, never failed.’ That was a long time ago, glib response, arrogance of youth etc., but that doesn’t make it untrue. I work in a field where solutions are found. If something goes wrong just accepting that it can’t be fixed is *never* an option and one of my few genuine strengths has always been an ability to ‘find a way’.
I’m reasonably clever, and reasonably good at my job and I often just take those things for granted. Something I’m not great at is unbiased self-analysis, however in the aftermath of things like that happening one of the first things you do once everything is back up spinning is take a good look at what went wrong and everything even remotely adjacent to it and decide if you’d do anything differently, and what you’ll change to try to mitigate similar problems going forward. In this instance there’s not a lot to be fair, the issue itself was a failure of a particular system, with a recovery plan in place albeit one that would have taken longer than the business would have liked. Throwing money at stuff like that can help bring recovery times down but the wallet isn’t bottomless and people like me have to decide where cash is best spent.
So how does this relate to your ongoing issue with the other thing? (I hear nobody ask). Well, I’m glad you asked (I say to nobody). In the aftermath of that little bit of soul searching it occurred to me that maybe the reason I am still unable to let go of these feelings even after this considerable time is that the situation I find myself in constitutes a personal failure, and as previously noted I don’t *do* that.
Whenever I have any kind of problem there’s always a solution. There’s a fix, or a trick, or a workaround. Sometimes they’re not pretty. Occasionally they’re even a little Heath-Robinson. Frequently they’re quick and dirty just to get a thing solved, pending a better, more robust effort. But the problem is *always* solvable.
I should accept that this one isn’t. This feels like a healthier, more progressive way of looking at my inability to let go of what I had, however in the cold light of self-analysis I know and understand that I’m just trying to lie to myself, to give a reasonable justification for how I’m failing to deal with it.
The truth is I just miss her.
As an extra little needle to my psyche, all things being equal, from the time I first heard about the issue until the final fix and everything stable was about two hours. In that two hours I didn’t think about her once, which would be good, if it wasn’t for the fact that knowing that throws into rather sharp relief the amount I actually do think about her during the normal course of any given day. That being said when it first happened all I wanted was to be able to talk to her, and as soon as I’d fixed it I wanted to tell her what I’d done.
I miss her too much.
