Breathing

All in all the examination of the blue prints for the new engine requiring dilithium crystals seems to have gone relatively well so far. I use the word "relatively" in it's truest sense of the word. It really is all relative. Given the circumstances.

In the last 4 or 5 months my entire working knowledge of a business that I've grown to know and hate has been turned completely on it's head. Things that had no bearing on my work, now do, and things that did now don't... If you follow, which to be fair, unless you're one of a very small number of professionals, you almost certainly don't. Some of the star fleet crew might get it, but I am being deliberately vague to protect the innocent. Take this week for example. Now I was fully aware that these things happened, but until I'd been involved in them, I really didn't have an understanding of what they actually do (as opposed to what I believed they do). The single most useful piece of learning I have from the last 12 months is a snippet from Scobi. In a nutshell: "Keep breathing, Don't die"

Monday was an all day review of the whole blueprint from our planetary system with everyone who had anything to add to it in the first instance, along with a few that poked holes in it to see if they got bigger or smaller and generally tested the stitching.

Tuesday was a mad dash to update all the critical elements of the blueprint and get them into some formats that can be relatively (there's that word again-Ed) easily shared with and understood by some of the other crew members.

Today started at silly o'clock (which is slightly later than stupid o'clock) and involved a certain amount of deck chair re-arrangement, tuning of the band and communication of understandings. This was followed by a journey to a local-ish outpost and a meet up with a couple of star fleet crew in the form of the badman and the artist. The badman has been slowly wearing himself out in the name of dilithium and is doing a great job of it. I'm trying not to hinder him and giving whatever support I can now that I'm allowed to get my hands dirty. The plan here is two fold. A) Not wear out the badman because there's more to do still, so help shoulder a little weight if possible and B) Learn from what he's doing so that at some point in the future I might be able to do the same. Right now B) seems like a pipe dream.... but it's only been a week. As for A), I think I'm helping... but today I suggested the re-instatement of an age old tradition that has been long neglected over the past 5 years and that most definitely was well deserved and overdue for my erstwhile colleague. Namely a pub lunch. Why they ever stopped I don't know. It's as if they cleared off with the smoking ban, but regardless, while they may be a rarity, I reckon that the mere act of walking out of the building probably helped more than anything else. Sometimes you just have to

Stop.

Take a breath.

Look around.

Take a deeper breath.

Feel re-invigorated.

Tomorrow will be more documentation preparation, further sharing of understandings, more furniture reorganisation and ice berg awareness sessions. The icing on the preverbal cake will be breakfast though. :-) :-)

More on that tomorrow.

Sleep well, breath deeply.

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This post originally appeared here: Posterous