Stress

Ah, the wonderful rollercoaster that is work. The ups and downs are coming in rapid succession now, and are bouncing me around quite sickeningly. Lets take some of them point for point:

1. I'm understaffed. I was told to submit justification for all my needed positions so that we could post and fill them rapidly.

1a. That was over a month ago.

1b. Some of my people that were out on medical leave have come back, and at least one person I was worried about having to fire is shaping up.

1c. One of my key people is out for two weeks for reasons I don't care to share here.

2. Vacation in a matter of weeks!

2a. Paperwork is mounting at an astonishing rate, and I need to get it done if I want to keep people out of my office while I'm gone.

2b. Customer audits over the next several weeks.

2c. Switching to the new planning system has rapidly exposed every single damned weakness in my raw materials area, which is throwing wrenches into every stage of production (which has moved beyond all reason, anyway). I have to fix it. Now. At least well enough to make it to July, when we'll be auditing the whole damned thing. If any of the capabilities were were promised actually existed, maybe the months of research and work that I put in on the data last year would have been worth something.

2d. They're not. Worth anything, that is.

2e. Did I mention that I'm the one that has to come up with how to fix all this crap?

3. The children refuse to sleep on a regular schedule. That has nothing in particular to do with work, but as an insomniac, I need whatever sleep I can get, and I'm frequently getting disturbed in the middle. This raises the overall stress level.

4. I recently got word that my company is likely to pick up some homeopathic products, which makes me so happy I could rip someone's throat out. Hell, that's the type of thing that could get me actively looking for another job. Even in all this economic murk, my company is still growing like mad, but they're doing it on legit pharma. I don't want my name anywhere on this mystical, pseudoscientific horseshit, and there's no good reason to take it on. Maybe I can do something to convince the higher-ups that associating our name with "magical" products will hurt our reputation with real pharma companies. Maybe our internal lab will protest when they realize they can't actually test this junk. I know our validation group will go insane. That might be the best thing. If we can't validate it, we won't make it.

5. That new planning system? It's changing the way we do testing. Now it coordinates three layers of entry and review before allowing release, with no duplication allowed.

5a. Did I mention that there are only two layers of people available to test and review in my area?

I feel like I'm doing a bad job. I'm hearing otherwise, but that doesn't seem to help when nothing changes for the better. I'm a glorified paper-pusher most of the time, rather than a problem-solver, which is what I am supposed to be doing. It depresses me that all the problems are either gigantic and need instant resolution, or miniscule and not a priority. I don't run into in-between things right now. All I have are extreme issues and fluff. I can't delegate, because I have no one to delegate to. Even the ones that might be capable are so backed up that anything else just won't get done, and the ones that aren't backed up don't have experience in the areas where I'm having the issues. I'm missing a layer of management above me that is actually supposed to be handling about a third of this crap, and the layer above that, while helpful, isn't someone I can drop the grunt work on. Give me a chance to analyze, and I'll fix your issues. Bounce me from artificially induced crisis to artificially induced crisis, and you'll get some decent spackling, but no solutions.

That's enough bitching for now. It was good to vent, though.