Had a conversation last week with my team lead about something that’s been annoying me lately, my increasing need to clean up after others before I can do my own work (or, on occasion, for me to clean up after others before different-others can do their work, because what’s even better than someone wasting one person’s time is when someone can waste two people’s time, plus the time of the dev teams waiting for us to do our actual work rather than do clean up). I sent an email as an example of what I was annoyed about. This morning, my team lead followed up and said, “Ok, I think I see. He doesn’t mind the hiccups because he just sees the progress.”

My response:

Whereas I feel like I’m going through life as an endless repetition of what happened to me just now when I went to go get coffee: I showed up at the coffee station, then realized someone had dumped water all over the floor, so before I got my coffee, I got a pile of paper towels and mopped up the giant puddle so no one slipped and fell, and meanwhile, someone I don’t even know came up and laughed at me for making a mess.

Happy Monday.