Blog Fabulous

Part I - Dealing With 500 Pages On A Weekend

by Christine(Yuna) on November 23rd, 2005

In my entire 9 and half years of IT career, I was able to dodge the bullet and never needed to carry a pager…. until this past summer. I pretty much had to kiss my work/life balance goodbye but I fought hard to have my life back.

Here is the first of the 3 part story:

One a Saturday night around 11:20pm, my cell phone started to spit a few text messages per minute at me for a good half an hour with this wonderful high pitch tone I picked. The worst part was that I couldn’t do anything with this phone while it was in the process of notifying me that “You got a text message”. I finally had to yell at the damn phone on the top of my lung, “SHUT THE F@#$ UP!!!” The next thing I knew, I stayed up on the SWAT call (a type of conference call to figure out the problems) until 3am. And this happened the night before! The weekend was ruined… Oh, and the best part was that I HAD TO DO THIS on EVERY weekend in July.

I was not the only one who had been losing life over this job. Majority of the people on this project hadn’t taken a single weekend off for a very long time. And working late hours without sleeping was expected by the client.

I was very puzzled: “Yeah… exactly…How does anyone keep his/her sanity without the right to sleep, let along living A life???”

I finally gathered all the courage and wrote a memo to the top project execs and copied to my own department managers to address the issue and suggested a few things to give people’s lives back in some ways if not all. I sat down with bunch of managers one day to work on the resolutions and it seemed that I had gained some grounds after the meeting:

1. If people worked on nights and weekends, they have the rights to take week days off.
2. No one should work more than 2 weekends per month and the schedule has to work around people’s personal plans.

I remember Tom Cruise’s character got fired because of a memo he wrote in Jerry Maguire. I guess I was luckier than him in this case. At least that’s how I felt after getting some nods from the project managers that day.

To Be Continued…

Share This

Related Stories

Part III - The Total Bullshit of Work/Life Balance
Part II - Crushed By Office Politics
Library/Restroom Wallpaper
Printables4Kids
Frolicking in Sun?

POSTED IN: Fabulous Coffee Break