focus and distraction

[chhotii]

Not much new. I'm trying to focus harder on work. I have a habit of reading the Internet on my phone while having my morning coffee, and the outrage of it all gets my blood boiling, which gets my attention and focus off to a choppy start to the day. Plus, the work day keeps getting punctuated by having to wait for tests to run, the computer to reboot, etc., giving me the unfortunate opportunity to look out at the state of the world again. After not getting done what I was supposed to at work last week, I resolved to be more heads-down and shut out everything else other than the open Jira ticket in front of me.

I'm working on the small details of how to configure some cloud resources, and how to write the test code to test to the configuration code, without doing some really smelly duplication of code that figures out these small details. I don't know if I'm focusing on this hard enough to get things done in a timely fashion. But I am focusing hard enough on this to manage to not think all day about just how much I hate Trump and how much I fear what he stunt he's going to pull to try to avoid the ignominious electoral defeat he's earned. Success!

Except... yesterday... I took my eyes off the code for a minute to try to find the perfect emoji to react to something on Slack, and found that some coworker had created a custom Trump emoji. Why? Do they like the guy? Do they just think he's funny?

Comments

[quietann]

I get the problem. I had it at my work too. Unfortunately retirement didn't help.

Throw in fears for one's own future along with everyone else's, and here we are, though. Pretending nothing is wrong seems even more wrong. Would postcards be allowed at your work? (My guess is probably not.)

However, it sounds like today went better for you, even with a WTAF Trump emoji.

[rmd]

Yeah, sometimes I have to just avoid some media for a while because otherwise I get way too freaked out. I figure I can be aware of the trash fire without carefully inspecting each piece of burning trash. And then I relax and go back to reading all the stuff and the cycle begins again...