Management Directed Time

Had a bad start to last week, picked up in the middle and fell apart on Friday.

Got spotted on the internet by a Senior Customer manager and had some explaining to do, well not really I was on and I shouldn't have been and I wasn't going to lie. This is problem I have, when I'm down I'm very easily distracted and can lose motivation, hence internet usage. Somebody found something interesting for me to do. Turn an IBM pSeries server on AIX into a Linux server. A lot of geekyness ensued.

Had an appointment with the Phsyciatrict hosptial that will be doing my Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. They just wanted to sound me out a bit to see what they could offer. In the end they decided on anxiety management CBT. They did suggest a group session but that is Mid-morning 25 miles from work. Not great timing. However my CBT will be a lot closer to work.

Towards the end of the week I was still trying to get the server up and running, wouldn't reboot so was giving the Internet a hammering looking at all the Linux forums trying to work out what could be wrong. In the end managed to work out it was firmware issue on the IBM machine itself and not Linux. Did another re-install and off it went, yipee. came of out of the lab and sat at my desk for a couple moments and checked what was going in the world. Had just gone to Apache's site to download a webserver when I got called into a quiet room and was told that I had been spotted on the internet again and the customer had complained!! I was shocked how could they??? I had been in the lab most of the day and researching issues as directed by the customer. I nearly broke down there and then. My managers were supportive and said just to go home while they sorted the matter out. I was in tears in the car.

Got a phone call from my managers manager (do you call them grandmanagers?) this evening. He hadn't been able to get to the bottom of it but feared that until something was sorted my mental health was seriously at risk. He told me to talk tomorrow off as management directed time (Company pays for it). He was at great lengths to point out that this was not discipilnary action it was for my own wellbeing. He needs to talk to HR but I think he wants me to be moved away from the glare of customer attention to a comapny site so that I don't have the stress of worried about whether the customer thinks I'm slacking or not. You can't say fairer than that. With the exception of doing my apprasial when told not to, I have had a great deal of support from my managers and for that I'm truly grateful