Back to work

A too short Summer break. Actually no break at all.

Feels like gone back to fastening bolts.

Follow the leader!

On my last day in office we celebrated my departure with a team/project pizza at "Donna Carmela", a true Neapolitan enclave in the metropolitan area of Milan. The funniest moment was not during or after lunch, when the beer starts to make effect, but before, while parking our vehicles ...

Good ol' Times

The first quarter of year after the R&D site where I work passed in the hands of another company has gone. After the Christmas break people are quickly getting back to work and with them many news and voices. Months ago, soon after the official "announcement", I though that nothing would have changed in the short term. I regret to admit that this is not true. There's been a time, a couple of years ago, when we used to sit all together, late in the afternoon, after a long day of whiteboard planning, technical discussions and coding and stare at the simulation waveforms projected on a monitor as it was our fireplace. It's no longer like that. We look at our waveforms on our own, no one sitting at our side.

Summer Harvest

I'm back home again after a couple of weeks spent on an alpine plateau not far from Trento, in the east end of Italy. My memory cards are overflowing with pictures and urgently need a reassuring download. I know they won't be all satisfactory: I've been distracted by some time consuming events. My car broke two times and required an urgent recovery for fixing. I could have bought a brand new camera with all that money bu the two event made me think about the importance of taking quick decisions.

The coming Autumn season will be busier than usual. Someone talked to me about an extra-mile to walk. I can't do but laughing at this, as I've always been running that stripe of land and I would like to harvest instead the fruit of my sowing.

Self-Maintenance Time

I'm feeling exhausted. In the first months of this year I've been pushing and pulling a team  of frantic designers in the attempt to reach some admittedly over-committed goals. The project run is very long. There's still a year or more of development and tests activities ahead of us. I need to stop, give way and breathe for a while. So I asked my manager to let me step back into my cozy and warm comfort zone for some time and act like a designer rather than a project manager. Some one else from the team has taken the shepard stick in his hands. This hiatus should also give me some time for studying and updating on the coming developments topics and, yes, take me smoothly toward the hot season (provided that it will ever decide to stop with these days hard rains and cold).

Strange to say, I must admit that now that I'm back to a design and development role I feel like ... unemployed. It will take some time to drain all the stamina the "master" role poured into my blood. Or, maybe, it's just the fear not to be able to get back to it. To this end, I have left one foot out: ready to take off as soon as possible.

Let's wait and see

I think this picture depicts very well most of my current feelings. It's the beginning of a new year. Forecasts are still uncertain, there will be as usual highs and lows. The economic downturn that affected us is still far to be a memory and I fear something bad could happen. Fifteen years of technical and operational excellence are a handful of dust when your employer, however strong and well positioned on the market, is no longer able to make you feel safe. I'm stranded by doubts about which way to go. Should I attempt to walk a new way? Should I keep crossing fingers instead? I actually feel the need of a change in my professional life. Lack of progress in my career is the only thing that does not make me feel completely satisfied and complete as a man. Some would argue that work is not all and that I'd better relax and focus on something else. There are good chances they are right. So, waiting for something to happen, I sit on the windowsill and watch how the things go.

"Uhm ... If it wasn't that the sun is still low, I'd pick another place and stretch myself to soak with sunlight."

Living for work

Assuming it was really necessary, this evening, as I was travelling back home by train, I got a reminder of how constantly and irreversibly the latest years' technology has changed our way of perceiving reality and interacting with it.

  I was sitting in a compartment close to many other -let me call them- individuals, sitting on their own, casting their sight on something emitting bright light from a flat screen and apparently interacting with them. All those necks bent down. I wished for a while to have a camera with me. I could have shot as many pictures as I wanted without being noticed.
  Unfortunately, the ambient light wasn't that good to take a picture with my phone and, in some extent, the idea to use this aberration of the human voice communication tool was in contraddiction with what was passing in my head about latest technology effects on our capability to sew line-of-sight social relations.

  Then I heard the sound of a laptop PC suddenly shut and turned my sight to the woman sitting right in front of me. Looking like many of those who have a good position somewhere in the financial district of Milan downtown, she had everything a ramping up professional could show off. She pulled her smartphone out of her bag and started whispering close to the microphone, not to be heard.

  I casted my eyes back on the magazine in my hands but, few seconds later, I noticed with the corner of my eye that her face had changed. She was imploring the person on the other end, presumably a man, not to hang up, to wait for her return, to let her clarify. I coudl even understand from her lips that she was asking pardon for being so distracted by work in recent times.

  Then, as our train passed through a long tunnel, she lost the connection and started desperately calling at him again. Upon the third or fourth failing attempt she started, I'd say with some dignity and elegance, crying and looking for some shelter turning to the corner on the side and looking out of the window, as if she was feeling ashamed of her rimmel dropping down her face.
 

  This let me thinking about myself and how close to her situation I had been more or less one year ago. I was no longer able to distinguish work time from that I should have dedicated to my family. I happened to work more than twelve hours a day, never stopping my brain, sleeping more or less four hours per night. And my connection to my family, my kids was fainting. I was tunring to a mere cash cow, a revenue generator: nothing more. My kid were getting used to ask me what I would have taken them upon my next travel return, not when I would have been back. Luckily - I think I've written this somewhere - I had a real person, not an hyperlink, at my side that woke me up again.

  We no longer work for life. We live for working. The economical downturn we're living these years is not helping us to divert from this trend. The fear of loosing a job is pushing us to do every day more, without stopping, without unplugging ourself from the mental framework that encapsulate us for five days a week, or even more.

That is not good.