Actually on Friday, our team was under tremendous pressure, as we knew that we were not able to get the work done in time. I had completed my part of performing system testing and sent the findings to the pretty girl subordinate, but she was still working on the other portion and hence I asked her to concentrate on what she was doing while i would help to debug and fix the program.
So, it was back to being a programmer for me. I started out quite slowly, as I haven't been coding for quite a while and had forgotten most of the programming syntax. But then, once I got the hang of it, I couldn't stop myself until I produced the "perfect codes".
Uh huh, I am such perfectionist that after having studied the codes that the previous programmer had written, I wasn't happy with it. I restructured the program and rewrote some portion of it (where the bugs were). That was also why it took me such long time to fix it. Between delivering a piece of mediocre work on time and delivering a piece of excellent work late, I've chosen the latter. So you can see, I'm obviously not suited to be a project manager at all, who should always has project timeline as the top priority. I think I fit in the profile of a researcher or analyst better.
The pretty girl subordinate also stayed up till 4am+ to finish up her part of the work. She will be on leave for this entire week, as she's going overseas for a vacation with her hubby. I wanted her to have a good rest before her trip and not to worry about the work at all, so i told her that i would take care of the rest. That was why i continued to struggle on my own until 7pm yesterday.
YM asked me in the comment of my previous post about how i actually kept myself awake through the night. First of all, i gotta say that i did not take any coffee at all; caffeine has never been the thing that i used to keep myself awake through the night. To me, it's only one cup of coffee per day, or perhaps two cups on very rare occasion, and that's it. I've been able to stick to this policy of mine so far without problem.
Secondly, i did not feel sleepy at all that night. Seriously, my eyes did hurt after staring at the screen for hours, and i did feel slight heaviness in my head as well due to sleep deprivation, but i wasn't sleepy and didn't even yawn once. This was a little bit different from the previous round of staying up till 4am to complete writing a long document. For that task, i yawned so much that my eyes were all teary.
So what was it that keep my awake and focused on my work? The answer is: passion.
Don't get me wrong. I've mentioned before that i do not have passion for my current job anymore, and it still stands. Yet, i do have the passion in this piece of task because i love problems solving. It is like solving a puzzle and i get great satisfaction when i manage to get it pieced together. The program bugs and imperfect coding were like the puzzle, and making the program worked was like me finally completing putting the puzzle together. That was probably my drive for staying awake and getting the work done.
My colleague and i had also talked about this before too, that we gotta love what we do and only then we can do it best, willingly and happily. It all boils down to whether or not we do have the passion and drive in what we are doing. If we do, we will strive for it, we will get the joy out of it, and eventually we will shine too.
So, the morale of the story is, as many wise people would have told us - do what you love and love what you do. It's just too bad that not everyone in this world is that fortunate to be able to achieve that, and i'm unfortunately one of those who's stuck in a job that i do not love.
Labels: work
