Work, work, work.

I have been so very busy working over the last three or four weeks, I haven’t had much of a moment to myself to think even.

There are a lot of days where I just wake up sometime between four and five, log in and start answering emails from London so I can be sure to keep things moving. At the end of this week we hit the ‘deadline’ for the project I’ve been working on and out of the 120 or so components in the project, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we are left with a quarter that won’t get out by then.

It didn’t have to be this way. I mean I made it clear back in the middle of August just how close we were to going off the rails but nobody at all seemed worried. I told the client back in the middle of September that one member of the team wasn’t getting her work done in a timely manner and how it was going to impact everything and that fell on deaf ears as well.

It was only after the first week in October that alarm bells suddenly started going off and people realized there were going to be big repercussions because things weren’t going to be ready in time.

The stuff I work on? It’s one part of a process that involves the registration of goods in China that have to go through review by the Chinese government and for them to be on the shelf by a certain date, they have to be submitted by a certain date. Also, the things I’m working on are being updated to comply with European regulations as well and there is deadline for those things when goods can no longer be on shelf if they’re not compliant.

The rub here though is that when I’m done that doesn’t mean things are finished.

Oh no, they have to be printed or made and then go to a factory to actually be filled and completed, boxed up and shipped around the world and all of that takes MONTHS so if the things I’m working on aren’t ready it impacts production scheduling and a whole host of other things that add up to lots and lots of money.

So, as we have gotten closer to the deadline again, people are waking up that there is going to be very real fallout if deadlines aren’t met.

And because the person who shall remain nameless decided to just take it easy and let things go, now I’m forced to push and push and push and push because on my end the people doing the work also have an agreed to turnaround time to do things and my items aren’t the only things they’re working on. Oh and that’s also assuming that said person does their job correctly and I don’t have to ‘fix’ all the things they make mistakes on or all the things that wind up changing where I need to art direct changes. It’s really a hot mess.

In the back of my mind, I keep thinking about the what I heard back from the company in January…‘We genuinely value your past contributions to the company but honestly think you would be better suited to a production art role. It’s really where your talent and skills reside.’

This was back when I was applying for more Project Management positions with the company and getting nowhere. I finally asked the talent recruiter why I wasn’t hearing anything and the line above was what I got back from the head of my group was an email containing that line. It was only two months later the same group head was contacting me because the person they hired in my stead had fucked up so royally they reached out to have me come back and put things back on track.

Then I think about the last few weeks knowing that the contract ends in just two months and it starts to bother me because I start to worry about what I’ll do then, how I’ll be scrambling to find some other work and where that will come from when it gets harder and harder and harder to find something at the age I’m at.

I could be really angry and a part of me is.

I could be afraid and a part of me is.

I can try to find something else to smoothly move into which I am trying to do.

But most of all I’m just keeping my head down and having a narrow line of sight on the task at hand while I try to get back to a normal work/life balance and get back to taking care of me again.