Friends

It's not every day I am in the mood I am today. Feeling grateful is one of the rarest moods for me actually. Most of the times I am in an acid mood, even when I am seemingly happy... Most of the times I have my own witty comments, basically a distillation of sarcasm and irony worked out over the years to be harmless and fun.

Of course my social traits are not so good, and as such, I am more adept at configuring network devices than using words properly.

But today I am grateful. Grateful for the friends I made over the years, of the friends I was able to keep besides me being very bad at keeping friendships. I can call myself lucky (hence grateful) for making so many great friends over the years. But being able to give out the love and effort to keep them is very hard for me. You could say, thoughtful reader, that I am easy to make new friends but hard to keep them. That is a horrible thing to say. Yet, that is me. It is part of my nature. Part of how I view the world and how I treat people around me. I am not a do-gooder. I am not one to easily forgive what I consider to be wrong. I am not one that stays calm and quiet when I believe something should be said and done. That puts me far away from being a popular guy.

Yet I managed to find people that like me. People that like me enough to call me and treat me like a friend. And for that I am deeply grateful. I sometimes am months away, without exchanging one email or message, and believe me I almost never call someone. It will be either IM or an email, go figure how someone can enjoy my company.

The feeling from being able to 'talk' (chat to use a more appropriate term) and yet being able to see the distance barrier go away... that feeling is magic. That in itself fills me with this cheesy gratitude feeling.

However, having months apart, and yet having a friend say (or chat) oh, I was thinking about you. That is awesome.

Having said that, can you imagine how I feel when out of nowhere, those friends offer a hand. When they open a door to you (figuratively speaking, of course), and you see a new path available. Yes, it’s that good.

So today I gloat, and I give myself the right to be cheesy. I love my friends. And I am grateful.

(Now back to our regular programming)

On the Log of Eternal Worries, the only really eternal thing are my worries.

Buddha teaches us that exterior happiness lasts very little. Worries are perhaps (amongst other things), the fear of seeing that happiness end.

The golden team I wrote about in the last post is no more. There are very few of us now, the other members left the company in pursue of personal goals and those left are burdened with so much work, we can barely work eat lunch together.

Yet, I still feel we look for each other, I still feel we want what is best for the Network. It's only that we are tired. We are too few to be able to meet our own expectations. We set such a high level of results a year ago and right now we do not have enough hands on deck to meet those expectations.

The pressure for results is high and so the rush to meet deadlines and basic project goals has been nicking our standards, a nick each day.

Although I spoke that out loud, that we are barely hitting our marks and delivering results with shortcuts that may have a cost tomorrow, I feel entrapped and taking shortcuts too. A few months ago I was so angry with myself for letting me do it I almost quit!

We do not have spare time for our own projects - the ones that show our love for our profession. Good documentation, periodic maintenance, config cleanups, roadmaps for improvements. All of our time is spent rushing one project after another, fixing things as they break, barely detecting severe issues before they blow. Sometimes we do get explosions and the shrapnel hits us hot and leaving scars.

All that drama aside, this is one of the best places to be, in Brazil. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, unless of course I get an offer abroad, who knows? A lot of people are leaving Brazil, our country is so deep in shit I cannot say that anyone that left has had a bad idea. But I digress.

We're still one heck of a good team. Were we better? Yeah, nobody replaced the ones that left. We are part of a bigger team now, but the core problems we face now we need to solve without the rest of the big team, because the big team also has its hands full and less people. I do understand how hard it is for them to help us. It's not that they don't want. They're being dragged as we are.

Anyway, this is the Log of Eternal Worries. And even when I am happy (and tired), I am worried about something.