Why bother?

I had a bad day at work today; the kind of bad day that makes you want to re-think your entire existence, your career, your way of life. Basically, I'm creating failure, and I'm surrounded by failure. Without going into specifics, I can guarantee we have no happy customers today, and no happy employees.

Bad days always end, however, and they often end at home. There I have three kids and wife who I love more than anything int he world and who, on most days, think I'm OK.

Bad days never really end, however, because at the end of a bad day, there's the wallowing and the what-if and the what-now, all the kinds of things you think at the end of a bad day.

We all talked about our days at the kitchen table. My entry: "My day was bad." The Young Daughter, 4, starts singing, "Bad day, bad day, go away, my day was BAD!" Flourish, big smile, mouth open wide enough to land a 757. That's her way of saying she cares.

I tucked the Young Daughter in tonight. I sighed deeply. The Young Daughter said, in reply, "What?" I said, "I had a long day."

She replied, "Yeah, I had a long day too in the hospital."

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Normally I'd mark that down as a perspective builder. But hers is one more situation about which I can do nothing. Meanwhile, I have a Vice President of Sales, an office fulll of co-workers and 12 customers who don't give a flying fuck that my kid has a tumor in her head, even if they knew, which they don't.

I have to deal with all that, too. The one and only thing I can do for the Young Daughter and the rest of the house is to generate income and maintain a vaild health insurance policy. Walking out in a huff is not going to be the answer, no matter what.

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But I'm at my end. I just can't do anything to fix anything. Working harder isn't the answer; in 12 hours of work today, which started with a phone call to Europe at 5:30 a.m. my time, I accomplished about an hour's worth of actual accomplishment. This time last year, I was the new guy who didn't know what I was doing. This time this year, I have the word "Senior" in my title; I don't know a lot more about what I'm doing, but I'm expected to impart that knowledge to the three new people we just hired, boom-boom-boom, as well as manage the four projects I have to manage, as well as trying to write documentation.

Meanwhile, The Wife spent a good chunk of today on the phone with doctors. The Young Daughter has a team of specialists doing battle against the dread disease. They're all very good doctors, individually. Until today, they had been concentrating on their own little areas, in isolation. The Wife finally demanded today that ONE of them take charge of the situation. ONE of them has to know a little bit about everything. As I put it, "Somebody needs to be the project manager." I think she made some progress. She's taken charge of the situation the best way she knows how, which is to say, she has taken charge of the situation, grabbed the situation by the neck and is leading it in the right direction. She's not a neurologist. She's more important. She's a mom. My admiration for her keeps growing by the minute, even as I know she's nearing the end of her rope, too.

So what it comes down to is this: My problems mean really nothing. My bad day means really nothing. Which, at this very moment, just makes me ask the question above.