busy, busy....

Over the last few weeks, as the various changes and reorganisations being made in my office start to bite, my workload has gradually ramped up and up and up. I thought I was reasonably busy before, but all of a sudden, my diary is full from 9am to after 5pm and there are simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done.

I left work after 7pm the other day, and when I arrived into the office the next morning, there were already another thirty unread emails waiting for me. I have documents to read and approve, and other documents to write, and they're just piling up waiting to be processed whilst I'm out in meetings collecting more work. Lucky for me, I'm usually fairly stress resistant to this sort of thing, and I'm pretty able to leave it well behind me when I leave the office for the evening. My recent news has also served to act as a healthy dose of perspective, reminding me of the things that are really important in life. My closest colleague is not bearing up so well: she's a tough cookie, but she works part-time and is really starting to struggle. Part of the problem is that the transformation going on at work has stripped us of the people who usually support us in our part of the organisation, and their replacements have not yet been recruited, leaving us swinging in the breeze as we try and keep things running as a completely new set of processes is rammed into place around us.

To make things worse, because I'm flying off to Canada for ten days holiday next week, I've got all that extra work to get done before I go. It's almost enough to make me regret the fact that I'm going away.... almost.... although it will leave my colleague feeling even more exposed.

Still, whilst I'm perhaps wishing that things were a bit quieter, I'm also acutely conscious that I should be careful what I wish for. No fewer than three of my friends have been made redundant recently. They worked in wildy different industries, but that didn't save them from becoming very directly affected by the economic downturn. In addition to that, another two of my friends work in the financial industry, and both are twiddling their thumbs nervously, wondering how to fill their days at work as the phone refuses to ring and wondering if they'll be looking for new jobs today, tomorrow or at any point in the near future. Rubbish.

Work is proper bobbins, but then I suppose that so is not working. There's a conundrum.

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I played football for 90 minutes this evening. The first hour was brilliant: my team was being hammered, but for the first time in ages I was running and running and running around the pitch. Not exactly gamboling, but positively bouncing up and down the pitch. I was probably as ineffective as always, but I was really getting some miles under my belt and I felt good. The last half hour was not so good though: I started to lose the sensation in my thighs, and by the end of the game was pretty much reduced to hobbling around as I couldn't feel my legs properly, and I still can't feel the soles of my feet. I'm having another MRI scan tomorrow, but I have to admit that I'm a touch worried about how quickly things seem to have deteriorated. Best to focus on the good hour I did have, I think... Hey ho.