Work-life unbalanced....

I was walking out of work a few days ago. My friend/coworker bsom noticed me carrying a box with a laptop in it and asked "taking work home again?" "yup", I replied, and he gave me a sort of sad look of pity.

As far as overtime goes, it's actually a pretty good deal - I can take a laptop home and get it set up in the comfort of my home, while watching TV and petting the cat, and get paid for it. It certainly beats the couple days last week where I was in the office until 10, setting up iMacs and Mac Pros that could not easily be transported home. I could use the money, what with my tendency to run my truck into things, and given the state of the economy I'm lucky to have a job that's willing to pay OT (knock on wood). Although, given that my employer has recently instituted a hiring freeze and has several open positions that will thus go unfilled, they pretty much have the choice of paying OT or not having stuff get done.

And get done it must. I have a long list of things I need to do - standard break/fix tickets, computer replacements, application development and deployment. We're supposed to migrate our entire email system by the middle of the year, and it's my job to make sure the new version gets installed on everyone's computer. Except we just upgraded our software deployment server, so now we need to get that working before I can do much of anything else. We're having budget issues that are getting in the way of me getting equipment I need. We have another project involving our images for laptops, which I handle, where I spent the better part of a day with a consultant who ignored everything I told them about how we do certain things, told us he had fixed the problem, and then spent the entire day proving that he hadn't.

One of the key phrases that people like to talk about is work/life balance. For someone like me, who doesn't have a whole lot going on in the "life" part, it's hard to complain too much about the work portion. While I'm not about to put dub-sixes on the Ranger, I could be doing a lot worse.

Still, I can't help wondering if I would have more in the life category if I didn't have so much in the work part. Probably not - when I have a day off, I end up spending it running errands or doing stuff around the house or sitting around eating cookies and watching TV, not hitting on supermodels. Still, it would be nice not to have to skip or cut down my gym time - one of the few useful things I do with my spare time, and I do feel bad that I don't spend a whole lot of time playing with Nibbler the cat.

The biggest problem with work is that I don't see it getting better anytime soon. I've got a ton of work that needs to get done, and when those things are done there is another giant list of things that need to get done. Many of the things I work on are the kinds of projects that never end. I already don't take time off - I just hit the point where I start losing vacation time because I've hit my max, and I can't see ever being able to take another day off when I can't get stuff done as it is. I have some doctors appointments and stuff I need to do eventually, but I can't see missing work.

I guess it's a good thing that I'm single, because if I wasn't I probably would be pretty soon anyway, because I can't see too many women putting up with that. But I don't really see a choice either.