i have been away (worklife)

not out of town, just caught up in the hyper-busy work that multiple investigations creates... my job is primarily twofold... daily performance improvement monitoring, data collection, processing, and analysis that becomes weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports... and daily incident and seclusion/restraint reviews to ensure policies are being followed to reduce risk as much as possible... there is not enough time for one person to do it all without working at it more than eight hours a day at least five days a week and that means no days off... each monday there is three days to caught up on... a holiday, a vacation day, a sick day, creates more days to catch up on and there is no one else to do my job when i am not there...

and then there are the things that go wrong that need investigating, extra time and energy to interview, to review video, to meet with external investigators and regulatory agency surveyors to find out what went wrong, if anything we did was wrong, then take action to correct it and ensure it does not happen again... a single investigation can take two days or more, easily, two days or more in which none of the regular work can be done, so two or more days that have to be made up with extra hours... the past two weeks i had seven investigations to juggle and somehow get done along with the daily work... and two of the past three weekends i also was on call, so had extra work on four out of six of the past saturdays and sundays...

and as if that is not enough, a fourth aspect of my job takes even more time... whatever a surveyor arrives, it is my responsibility to provide them with everything they need and that usually means giving them the majority of my time on days they are there and then the majority of the day after they leave producing a report on their findings and an action plan to fix anything they found wrong... since march 1st i've had three full days of surveyors in two separate visits, meaning five days of work for surveys... it is march 21st and so far, there have been 15 working days in the month... four of the six weekend days have been work days as well, so only two weekend days allowed for any catch up... five days of surveys and ten days of investigations and that leaves most of fifteen days of normal work that would require 9-10 hour work days not done...

not enough of a challenge, it only gets more challenging... surveyors are expected for seven of the remaining eight work days of this month... somehow, the full month of daily work must get done as well...

and more... i took two of the fifteen workings days off just to recover and work from home because i can get moe done at home... catch up?... simply does not happen... so i throw skip some reports and throw reports together based skimming data and intuitive analysis, not scientific method simply because there is no time to perform the tasks required for scientific method...

and more... we do not factor in any of the routine filing and physical organizational work required to maintain some semblance of funtional order to the massive volumes of documents that pass through my hands every day... a full 40 hour week of creating file folders and reviewing and filing paper would catch that proces up, if there was only time... this is the real of work life for the moment...

and to survive, if find mental escape in games i enjoy, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself... and also in audio-visual stimuli, stories brief as songs and long as movies and multi-part tv series... and in writing, though the past two weeks there's been much less time for writing because i needed to escape into external distractions to relieve the internal pressure in the brain... too much thinking, too much stress, doing hundreds of hours of work in a quarter of the time requires intensity that hurts the brain and to heal, escape into other thought processes works for me... a strategy game based on numbers... and sci-fi tv shows that let me leave the normalcy of human life as it is today to imagine a different world, way, and perspective...

i miss you when i am gone, even if you rarely acknowledge you are here... i miss the illusion of sharing, caring, and not being alone... but healing is a solitary process, so i have been away... i am not quite back... i have much more catching up to do at work, much more pressure to put on this brain, and therefore more escape time away from daily babbling as well... but there must be time for babbling... and then, there is the profound desire to continue the sharing in the myriad of other blogs underway... forty four blogs at blogspot alone and then, another half dozen reconnecting me with toronto (have i mentioned the connection has returned as strong as it ever was?... some would call me insane, but then, i am when compared to what humans call normal... it is the right thing to do right now)... all i need is about twice as much time as i get in each day...

and then, as if all that was not enough, there is the long term sleep deprivation taking it's toll in the erosion of this body and brain cells... here i am gathering my wits to explain to myself and to you where i have been and what my mind and body must fit into this life (and we have not included any social life, which does happen too) so i can make some sense of it and perhaps find more efficient use of the time...

fatigue... survival... and all i can hope is you do not feel too slighted by the limited time i can share with you here and in other places... i wish we could share more... i crave more personal and more intimate sharing... i must find ways to work fewer hours, as impossible as that sounds... i must find a way to take at least a week off giving ass little of the nine days in a row to work... i must find a way to fit in more regular exercise and more sleep (softball at 8:30 tomorrow, less than four hours away, and then a game at 11am and another game at 4:30pm and i am on call so i may have to run into work between games or after the last game, maybe a late night at work to start another long work week)... i must find a way to make time to find intimacy and fall in love again... if i do not do these things, i will risk burn out, illness, death, and definitely not be fully satisfied with life, even as i enjoy it immensely from moment to moment...

so there is a summary of life as i know it in e-the-real today...

how's yours? :)