Apr 17

 Annnddd the gout is back again. That's on. Off. On. Off. On. For those keeping count. I think basically it's just one long on for the last month +, which, is not good. It's supposed to shift in 2 weeks. Having it stick around like this means almost certainly my uric levels are running continually high.

Almost like I needed the meds I said I needed which the NHS didn't give me 3 weeks ago.

Piss ups in breweries. No surprise there then.

Hazel's mood has continued to bounce around. From snarly lows, to contented jokey highs. Tricky. I am beginning to get a bit gun shy with it - avoiding her sometimes and at other times getting a bump in anxiety when she floats by ( like waiting for the other shoe to drop ). I had this exact same pattern of existence with my mom when I was younger. That same air of anxiety whenever she approached - the whole, what now, what horrible thing is going to unfold, what fight, what nastiness. You end up flinching before something happens, like a beaten dog. 

The longer Hazel's mood is stable, the better I am. This is the flip side of the coin of dealing with someone with an overspilling mental health issue. It can be super hard to deal with and in turn can start to cause all sorts of knock on effects to those around. Depression. Avoidance. Anxiety. Withdrawal. In those living with someone going nuts. It can be the case that the person in the eye of the storm - the gravity well of a person that sucks everyone else into their destructive spiral - does not see the damage they output onto everyone else and it ends up being for the person suffering at the center just another reason to hate everything - because people end up avoiding them, or not reacting well to them. They forget that it can be like handling an unexploded bomb, every single day. People get twitchy. This exact set of circumstances has played out many times with Hazel. Her dad trying to communicate how difficult it was to deal with Hazel. How much pain. How much anguish. To breaking point.

This is the rule of thumb for carers of any stripe. Mental. Physical. Chronic illness. It can be very challenging. Impossible even.

I wish - for herself if nothing else - she could get on top of her issues, make progress, but, it seems very much like she's treading water in many ways. I think giving her a stable safe place free of money worries helps very very slowly to let her build a bit of trust and happiness. But. There are still major things in there that need tackling if she's ever to truly be free of it.

And of course the impact on everyone else around her can be severe ( and in turn is a vicious circle making her worse ).

Sometimes mental difficulties are like that. Rolling around an ever decreasing spiral that is driven by the person themselves - to the horror of onlookers. Understanding you have a problem, where that problem is, and baby steps on correcting it is a huge ask that many can't get to unaided. And in a perverse way don't want to get out of. I've heard the argument before. Oh people like being in misery. Or angry. Fucked up. But in my experience this isn't true. It's not that it's liked. Wanted. It's that it's the only thing that they can see. The only thing they can take a tiny measure of regularity out of.

This is often the crux of the difficulty. Stuck. And unable to unstick themselves.

Ultimately. You cannot save those that refuse to be saved. It's awful. And terrible. And I wish it weren't so. But. There has to be a glimmer of will to do that in order to break out of the cycle. Not everyone can do that. And very few have some epic overreaching champion that can do it for them. And so they are consigned to wither. Such. Is the brutality of existence. No guarantees. Do or die.

Today I have been productive at work. Banged out a whole bunch of stuff. Taken things by the scruff of the neck and got them ordered and ready. 99% of which to be clear is not my fucking role. I am tidying up for others and doing their jobs. Great. Today it was either that - sort all the shit out. Or watch another week float by flailing around in shit.

I told Andy today that whatever was going on structure wise. Employee wise. It wasn't working.

What I truly wanted to say was, fuck this shit, once again all the fucking weight on me again. I am done. Goodbye.

But I held my temper. I have to always remind myself not to make decisions when I am pissed off. Take the longer view. The more calculating view. Earn your money. Shut it down. Rinse and repeat. To be clear. This isn't me. I am not one for just turning up, punching a clock then fucking off. But. If shit gets so bad. Then. I coach myself that option is there. Should be exploited. Whether I would actually do that or not - probably not. That sort of shit does not sit well with me.

Anywho. I have shot a number of salvoes across the bow of Andy today. A number of fuckups. Missteps. Laziness. I am Not Happy. I think honestly even if I am continuing to stick around, at this rate, we will start bleeding clients away as fuckups escalate. The quality of our service has gone down. It is inevitable. Shit needs to get better to stop the bleed. At the moment, that's not happening.

As ever I don't think Andy has the werewithal to actually understand what's going on, and then to grasp the nettle and tackle it. In both cases he has weak skills. Oblivious in the first instance ( and with an avoidant personality that doesnt want to deal with anything difficult ), and incapable in the second instance - just not got the chops to cut through issues and sort them out. Not enough Know Whats. Or gumption. He's a nice guy ( away from money ). But a leader he aint. Nor brilliant trouble shooter. That's not an insult. Most people are not these things. It's just a bit of an issue where you kinda need to be that to have the job / role you have.

But then, that is one part of Andy's story all over. Faking it, until he makes it. ( which by and large is the worlds shittest strategy and cause for so much bullshit and incompetence smoothed over by a desperate drive to just Look The Part ).

Work looks like it's shaping up to be a bit easier this week. Albeit. The brain trust are releasing a major update to one of our major clients this week. If all the other releases to date are anything to go by, it will be a clusterfuck. And I will be up to my knees in people clutching and sobbing at me to rescue them.

Lovely.

Today with a bit of breathing space at work I got to be clever and mildly innovative.

A nice bit of SQL with some slightly out of the box solutions.

Sadly it's so clever that I can't really explain it here without getting really deep into technicalities. Suffice to say I did some nifty things with modulo and math on foreign key pointers to get me a deterministic RNG that avoids any costly functions or a sniff of random calls as a starter and then some nifty row partitioning to effectively pull determinstic random rows from a very large resultset using that funky RNG hack. And it runs in the blink of an eye. It's not what you do with say, a foreign key. But it works super well.

It's a lot of a math hack to get what you want without heavy lifting. The business world equivalent to the fast square root code hack in Id's Quake game if I do say so myself.

I like being clever with machines and treading untrod ground. Pushing boundaries is cool.