Last week at work was pretty exhausting. 60 hours including some work last weekend and I should be doing some work this weekend but I can't bring myself to do it. I think two of my other co workers took care of a bunch of stuff but I am afraid to log on and look. I have been working under a senior structural engineer for this project and have been doing coordination with the other disciplines and generally getting the drawings together, but had another project a few weeks back require way more time than anticipated and my little BWI air lighting vault project came back online out of the blue with a quick restart so I am a little behind on this project. Luckily we roped in some other team members at the last minute but I need to ease up when February starts. It's time to start mentally switching gears...
The good news is that I really like my job. The senior structural I'm working on for this project has a project coming up that it'll probably miss out on due to maternity leave but it sounds super cool. It's a firefighting training facility that has all these areas where they actually train with real fires and put them out with water and whatnot. I really want to work on the fire building but oh well.
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I never ended up finishing that thought above. But my co-workers have been awesome the past few weeks. The senior structural I mention above is the only other person on the team with kids (it's like a 20 person team, wtf) so he is really the only person on the team I talk to about pregnancy/kid stuff. He and his wife sent us some gifts which was really nice, and he'll send me fun pictures of his two year old because he has no one else on the team to talk about his kids either haha. Another guy on the team who is younger wanted to ask me about the pregnancy one time but wasn't sure what to say so he asked me how "the thing" was going. Inside I laughed so hard but did not call him out as I think he was just trying to be careful.
In general, even with the younger co-workers I am so impressed by them. I think structural engineers are a different breed- I'm glad I came to this profession later in life, there's no way I was as mature as some of these guys and gals are when I was in my 20s. I mean, we are definitely doing a very serious job that involves a lot of risk if not done right. Recently I've been working a lot with a co-worker who is 27'ish going on 40, and people call him Mr. (insert last name) sometimes and I think it's said only semi-ironically. He has been a god-send for me- there was a project that went awry last week and it was so ridiculous what they needed us to do to get it back on track that I think I just kind of shut down- I couldn't even get stressed about it because it was so stupid, and I don't want to be stressed at work right now. It's really just supposed to be a small renovation project but some of the design issues involved are things I have never dealt with before and I was in a bit over my head on that. He's on the project too but not supposed to be that involved except to help when I need him to, however, he's a busy body so he was up to speed on most things going on and I admitted to him I was a little overwhelmed. He basically did what I needed him to do- which was get stressed on my behalf and get on the phone together with the project manager and basically tell him what they were asking wasn't going to happen in that time frame. 🤯 At some other point during the day I was talking to the architect and my brain was shutting down for some reason and I looped him into the call and he was able to help out, and then it all clicked back for me eventually and I was good to go again, just needed a mental break I guess. And then this week I slept unusually poorly two nights ago, and slept through my 7:30 alarm on Monday morning. Little did I know that the project manager had put a 9am meeting on our calendars that morning and around 8:55 I got a text from my co-worker asking if I was getting online. Unfortunately this meeting was to discuss some structural issues with what our mechanical engineer friends wanted to do so I couldn't just sit there in the background. I told him I was but that I literally had just awoken, I was so groggy, and if he could get on the call too and basically take charge in the beginning. I'm by far the most junior person on the project so I feel like this is all very embarrassing and I can't do too much about it right now. I will definitely not forget how supportive Mr. (insert last name) has been. He keeps reminding me that I have a golden excuse for everything right now and I need to milk it for all it's worth. Well at least for this project I think am unintentionally succeeding in that.
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