I'm glad this week is over. I had just about reached my limit for anxiety and frustration. My body really doesn't handle stress well. My blood pressure goes up, my acne breaks out, and my body gets all tense with back pains. If it weren't for the sincere efforts of my friends I may have exploded.

How it Began

Back in early May, my employer offered me the prospect of a promotion. It involved a raise to $18 per hour and an office manager position of the Vermillion office. Catch was, I'd have to spend the summer in Pierre as an intern. Seemed well enough, my girlfriend, Abby, would be in Huntsville anyways. Why not add an extra 280 miles between us. My only gripe was that I'd have to maintain two homes over the summer and pay rent on an apartment no one was living in.

I'll admit, I learned a lot this summer; way more than I would in any classroom. However, it involved lots of code-monkey/bitch work. Many of the projects I worked on, I was the sole developer. The lead would just forward me the client's emails, and I would do the work. On many occasions, I would write the emails to the client signed with my lead's signature block and forward it to the lead to forward to the client.

And so the Bureaucracy Begins

So less than a week before I'm to return to Vermillion and take my new position, a friend of my boss finds himself unemployed. Eager to have his full-time skills in the Vermillion office, my boss offers him the office manager position at a wage unknown but most likely higher than my own. In turn he offered me the title "Senior Adviser of PHP and MySQL Development" or some bullshit like that. I get to keep the raise. I was pretty much ok with that. It meant the same pay and hours with supposedly less responsibility.

So I'm back now and my seniority and experience has surely rendered me a hub for knowledge. More to the point, my co-workers are more familiar with me than our new manager and more frequently use me as a resource for their needs. Again all is good.

It Starts Stacking Up

One of the project leads in the Pierre office just spent several days in Boston presenting a project to a client. The project is a fixed rate quote that was way under quoted. Consequently, we are way over due and way over budget. I can't share any numbers, but the total loss for our company is more than I make in a year.

Even though I wasn't the project lead, I feel personally responsible. I wrote about 80% of the code that makes up the application. The reason I wrote such a large percentage is because we knew we were over budget and I'm one of our more efficient PHP developers. That and as we progressed, no one knew the code as well as I did.

Unfortunatly, my labor is spread across 4 other projects. The prior project is taking time from my others. This week I found myself with to-do lists stacked a mile high and growing. A couple 10-hour days and 6-day weeks later I'm quiet exhausted. I'm supposed to be a part-time developer.

Thursday morning I woke up to discover I had 4 voice mails from the lead that went to Boston. When I arrived at work in a rush, I received a lecture from the Pierre office manager about the company's expectation regarding developers making themselves available to their leads on high profile projects. I seemingly don't hear my phone ring at 6:30 am...

I soon discovered it wasn't all that important. The product search modifications can wait till next week. I was half tempted to say fuck it. I turned down three other job-offers this week; one of them with a competitive wage. I did however agree to take on two free-lance projects. Neither of which I have had much time to commit to.

My biggest fret is this e-bay clone project I have due at the end of August. I'm the lead on this one and bid it out at 146 hours. Provided I put all my other projects on the shelf, I would have 80 hours to complete it in.

I probably wouldn't do this to myself if I wasn't concerned how I was going to pay rent and a 20 credit hour tuition bill this upcoming month. I'm not astoundingly brilliant and my parents and I make too much to qualify for any decent financial aid.

Now, I have to go into work on a Saturday while my friends go to Riverboat days in Yankton. When I get off, I plan to finish fixing the Research Gateway for the library (which ITS couldn't manage to do). Maybe I'll get my design for the database of one of my freelance projects deployed tonight.