It has been a month since I started with Costco, and a week longer since I left T-Mo. I am still settling in at Costco, and will be for some time I think. It is a very very different shop than T-Mobile EIT, better in many ways, and behind in others. Like any org, it is simply different. Since I like to collect knowledge and see the big picture I know I will be gathering bits and pieces for some time to come before I have a true feel for "how it all fits". Since I think out of left field I hope to find perspectives helpful to others around me.
One thing that surprised me in the time since leaving T-Mo is just how much energy I held around my job. I found, in fact, that I had been building a deep anger for quite some time, and that it had begun to grow in the last several months beyond what I could imagine. It was there in front of me, but I never really knew it, or at least did not choose to acknowledge it. I think my manager saw it...he did his level best to balance the ever-growing list of stuff coming down from above, running interference where possible, and softening the blow for the rest. He's a good man, and a good manager.
The anger began in August 2012...or maybe earlier...as more of an annoyance or nagging feeling. Our team had been shaved to 1/3 its already-reduced size, and then I found out how much income my skills should bring me in the marketplace. Of course, my philosophy has always been, "you're worth what you're paid, and if you think you're worth more, then find someone who will pay you more and then you will be worth that amount." The gap, however, was larger than I had imagined, and I felt I was slipping backwards, and that the business realities at T-Mo were unlikely to improve, and that some baggage I was carrying would hold me back nonetheless. Thus began a slow smoldering, though I stuck it out because of the adventure of learning so much more new stuff.
By April we had been chest deep in a major effort to upgrade our monitoring game. We had a few more bodies again, but there was sort of a stasis where things are lurching. I had been neglecting my at-least-quarterly appointments with my doctor, critical in helping me stay on top of my "pre-diabetes". I had also been neglecting refilling my ADHD meds on the poor logic of "if I cannot finish this one thing I've had on my plate at work for months then how can I take the time to see after this?" Yeah...stupid.
I finally get to my psychiatrist for my ADHD scrips. She takes my BP and it's high. Not sky-high, but still, there it was...one more thing nagging at me. I knew I was neglecting my health, but still did little in the short term, and time simply flew by between my remembering, "oh, yeah...I gotta get on that BP thing."
For some time I had been having sleep problems. Not "can't get enough sleep", but instead that I sometimes slept a day away, even two days on one occasion. I felt drug down all the time, and I had stopped my mid-day 3-mile walks because I was...wait for it...too busy. My body was enforcing its own requirements, messed up as they were. Still, I carried on.
By July I finally see my doctor. I was already well down the road in my interviews with Costco and had just missed out on an even-better-paying gig at Expedia...like really really better-paying. That's another story about introspection and impressions and team dynamics.
Anyway, at my doc's office we find my 12-hour fasting blood sugar was 241. By about 290 I'm drowsy, but anything over 100 is negative. Over 140, I think, is diabetes. His first words were about insulin. Five years I have been controlling this problem and I get off the wagon for less than a year and it all goes to pot. I spent the rest of the day at the bottom of a bucket facing the truth.
This job is killing me...literally.
My blood chems come back a week later and most of the numbers are normal (iron at the high end but not over), but my A1c, the 3-month average of blood glucose, is 11.9. Get to 6.5 and you're in pre-diabetes land. Past 7 and it's diabetes. Nearly 12 is syrup in my veins. Now it all fell together, the sleep patterns, the energy levels, the pink film growing in the toilet (bacteria love excreted sugars). The rest catches up...nerve damage, kidney damage, and beyond. I dread the idea of losing either my freedom to walk or my ability to think through complex things.
By this time the anger has swelled, creating a lethargy of its own. Finally the offer to join Costco comes, and after a round of back and forth I accept a job that gets me close to my salary goal while leaving room for growth. I like growth.
Meanwhile, my closeout at T-Mo is going horribly. Happy for me is helping folks solve problems, and that is where I centered. Docs about stuff fell off the table because they just brought me closer to the anger, even though at the time it was more like simply hitting a wall when it came to even trying. Embarrassing, really, and a crappy way to leave people who are expected to pick up my load. But...
As I closed out and left T-Mo I found there was something nagging me at the back of my mind. One more thing to draw it all together. It took some time before I realized it was my late brother-in-law, Stu. Even now as I type I tear up...because it was all so avoidable, and he was so cool and funny, and so in love with his sweety. I wanted to see him in his 60s and 70s, a man much like his dad and the rest of Lisa's very cool family.
Stu died suddenly just before Thanksgiving 2011. His wife arose from bed, leaving him sleeping while she made breakfast. She returned a while later to find him on the floor by the bed, already passed on. Everyone cried. I gave part of his eulogy and it was the absolute hardest and saddest thing I have ever done.
It turned out that Stu a congenital heart defect that seemed to be the prime contributor. For the previous few days, however, he had felt like crap. He had just changed his blood pressure med...41 and he's on BP meds...and he was thirsty all the time and feeling generally bad. He was supposed to schedule a nuclear stress test, but had been too busy to make sure it was scheduled, and likewise too busy to deal with the feeling-like-crap-on-a-new-med thing, which should have been an urgent sign of problems.
Did you catch that? Too busy. Feeling like crap. Needing to take the time to take care of his own health but putting it behind his work. In many ways it was like a mirror for me. A good man with a loving family too busy to take care of himself...and Stu had died.
In a very real sense I had to not just leave T-Mo, I had to run. Drop everything, stop trying to fix it all even past by "last day", and run.
I do not blame T-Mobile. They're good folk trying to make it all work on a lean-for-now model. I do hold them responsible in some ways. That was thanks to co-workers reflecting the same feelings.
I did not hold T-Mo more than a tiny bit responsible when I gave notice. I'm an adult, and I should be watching out for my health. After I gave notice, however, folks came out of the woodwork with the same workload and balance-of-life complaints. It's a Western, particularly American habit to think or at least function in the mindset of "I am not getting my work done", versus "I have too much work to do and so cannot do it all". Even though we know the truth we still blame ourselves. Crazy.
The responsibility bit came after I gave notice. Many others there expressed the exact same concerns about their jobs. Good talent had been bleeding out the door for a year, but us die-hards held on. People I thought of as having it more together than me said much the same. So, it was not just me, the broken-Scot I have carried for many years now. It really was a broader problem.
Since I left my feelings have run up and down the track. I thought and reflected and talked to myself around this or that, and began to dig out the feelings and put things together. I was, and still am to some degree, angry. Not mad...not an "I blame you" anger...just anger tinged with sadness. Anger at myself for letting things go, and anger at T-Mo for driving staffing levels so low that it's burning out their best. I miss working there...the comfort of the familiar really, but I do not miss dying there. I am sure there are any number of companies in the same boat, focused so much on some imagined labor-dollar target that they waste their investment in skilled talent.
I am okay with my mortality. I just don't want it too soon. Like many if not most I want to see what happens in the next several decades. I know the time will come when I will be ready to lay down for the last time, when the world, as interesting as it is, begins to repeat itself for the fourth or fifth time, when many whom I love have passed on as well.
I hope to have many cool and interesting jobs and roles in the years to come. I just do not want any of them to kill me.
