I never thought working from home could be demanding. Pre-Covid, the thought
of working remotely always conjured up in my mind images of possibilities with a
relaxed lifestyle: I could run errands, take care of household work, cook nice
meals, etc. To some extent, these were true until two weeks ago.
The pace picked up after I committed a large chunk of code into the common
repository (the main branch in computer jargon) right before the last month
of code release. It was every programmer's nightmare. First we saw seemingly
unrelated problems in automatic testing. Next, QA engineers started to complain.
And then, developers of other teams began to ask. Bugs and meetings were
launched to track the issues and a flood of requests started to pile up in my
inbox. Well. Three and half years after joining this company, I finally created some
blocker bugs. The big bosses were informed. Things heated up. One good thing was that largely they had the sense to leave me to my job.
Drilling down for root-causes while fielding questions from all sides, I found
myself backsliding into the old habit of sitting for hours at a time, thinking
this was just temporary. All the transactions were in emails, zoom meetings, and
online chats but the pressure was real and work intensive. Explaining myself to four
groups of people and trying to debug and code at the same time exacted a lot of
energy. Everyday, people would ask for updates. My frontal muscles unconciously
tensed up and, from morning till night, time just flew.
I blamed the devices and further made a fool of myself by pitching to the
management that we needed to upgrade the older equipments in R&D and QA and
convince customers to do the same. I had the data and no one could argue. But at
a meeting, a smartass SOB suggested a different approach which hadn't occurred
to me until then. I made it work in three hours and problem solved.
All these sounded fun and indeed it was in some way once one learnt to deal with
stress. After all, it gave me a sense that I was contributing to something.
Moreover, I didn't feel a tiny bit of embarrassment which I would have five
years ago. I lost the ego.
I had a hard time keeping my other practices up. I managed to do yoga, stretch
calves, lift weights, and run. I didn't sacrifice sleep. But my dictionary-reading
slowed to a crawl, averaging only a quarter page per day.
Two weeks under fire started to take a physical toll. Thu afternoon, my upper-left
jaw started to swell at the back and I felt the virus attack. Fri, I ate one mid-sized
watermelon and the swell got better. In the evening, my 48kg kettlebell arrived, a
black, shiny, smooth beast, reminding me of what I should really focus on.
P.S. I worked mostly with Indian engineers and managers, many on the other side
of the globe. I found them hard-working and very collaborative.
