This evening I am not a happy bunny. This evening I face the prospect of returning to work with a head and heart full of anxiety and apprehension, on a magnitude I haven't felt since I was a kid returning to school.
It's no secret to anyone who follows my blogs, or who knows me, that there is no love lost between me and education. I can't honestly say that I even like the threads of my job any more. It used to be an acceptable pain to bear in exchange for a pay cheque, and before the job changed this time last year there was always the fact that there was a flesh and blood person to work with onsite. To say it has decayed still further in quality is an understatement and frankly I’m amazed that after sixteen years as part of an on site team I’ve managed to keep it together working alone in an office for the past year, the lion’s share of it with only remote support. For reasons which these days are quite beyond me I keep returning to notions of art from time to time, but often lacking the will or energy to actually engage in it. The best part of my art away from the day job has been the joy of productivity and achievement. Nothing so valid exists in the former - its problems are repetitive, often created by misuse, ignorance, third party fuck ups, or a combination. Art is a far cry from changing printer toners (most benign), diagnosing those third party fuckups (more annoying), or perpetually replacing keyboards and mice in abused IT rooms (the most heinous and repetitive crime). It's fair to say that I'm heartily sick of directing my efforts in such an environment.
I knew, even before I booked the time off, that taking the recent four week holiday was always going to be a double edged sword. This used to be the case ten years ago, when I worked term time only and had all the school holidays to myself. I tends to be the case that too much time away leaves me blissfully restored back to factory presets (to extend a professional parlance) which I think is why I’d been neglecting the idea of taking a break at all since Xmas.. an act of self harm I never imagined I’d ever contemplate. I had been looking forward to a happy break of self determination, but life had other plans and all was succinctly undone by two crises. One thing I had consoled myself with was a return in the final holiday week, construed on my part to help soften the blow, and to a degree it worked. What caused the next headache was the state of play regarding the new network, which I will not go into here but suffice to say it’s not as it was supposed to be, promises and otherwise. With the cumulative stresses of the “holiday”, combined with four days of trepidation and two and a half live days of actual chaos complete with staff and kids, I spontaneously folded in two and have been off sick for the past week. I’m supposed to be returning tomorrow (as I write this) on the grounds that my week’s worth of self certification will have expired. An extension would require a doctor’s certificate and that would be fine if I could actually get a spontaneous appointment. Alas such things no longer seem to exist and so with that circumstance it seems most prudent, if undesirable, to try returning. If I’m honest I really don’t know how well it will work out. In addition to the unknowable headaches there will also be the coming disruption in the form of my girlfriend's exacerbated treatment, which I only found out about ironically thanks to a meeting which I shouldn't have even been able to attend. This may well pose a bigger headache for the people I work with than I would wish for them, but I have hopes that they can accommodate our needs as they arise. From my perspective I'm not sure they have any more of a choice in the matter than either of us.
