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 Thoughts 

Work

Work has a tendency to take over your life. It is often said that you should leave your work behind when you go home. It's a nice theory, but it doesn't quite, er, work . . .

When talking to friends, I often feel as though I haven't done much recently. This is actually not the case. I'll have done all sorts of stuff which I enjoyed doing, learnt from etc, I just don't talk about it because it's very difficult to explain what it is, and why it is interesting to people who haven't got the background. Generally, I find that people are not terribly interested in the intricacies of looking after a very large network - if they don't know what NDS is, then there's little point me wittering away about how I put together some useful application objects in it. Phrases like 'loosely consistent distributed database' tend to produce blank looks, even on people who are technically knowledgeable.

I don't leave work behind when I leave. The justification is that, work is generally a chaotic environment with many and frequent interruptions, but some of the stuff we need to do requires some thought before we do it. The actual reason though is that once my brain has started doing something, it usually doesn't stop until it arrives at an answer or hits a brick wall. In the latter case it usually gets stuck in a loop. On a number of occasions, I've woken up (or been just on the point of getting to sleep, which is really annoying) with the answer to something work-related. It even gets into holidays, particularly when there is no other distraction - pondering some aspect of distributing applications to secured NTFS disks will while away a long car journey very effectively.

I also write all documentation at home. I can use the editor I'm used to, have a comfier chair, and I can have proper music instead of using headphones 8->. The no-interruptions reason is actually a good one, which is just as well.

To some people, this would imply that I'm working too hard, and have no life. The problem with this view is that the alternative is actually worse. I do this because I like doing the job I do. If I was doing a job where I could indeed forget it entirely when I left of an evening, I would be doing a job I didn't care about, and one that didn't interest me. Given the number of hours that I'll spend at work during my lifetime, I feel it is very important that I do something that doesn't bore me - I don't want to spend a large proportion of my life on autopilot.

But maybe that's just me.

Thoughts.

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