- Working a lot (quite some stress, but we’re getting there)
- Teaching (great fun)
- Following The Big Bang Theory, Fringe and Chuck (very funny, intriguing and quite funny respectively)
- Playing a lot of Rock Band 2 with my good friends Robert and Liesbeth (first 100% for a bass line on Expert!)
- Playing way too much Rome Total War…thanks for getting me hooked, Rob!

My first day back at work after my vacation my boss asked me in for a chat and announced that:

• Two of the five teams in our unit (the two field ops teams) were being disbanded as teams and the people therein moved to our other office to join both field ops groups together in one unit. Makes sense, but it was a bit on the quick side.
• All the remote management and service tasks from one of those teams was to be moved to my team. Ouch, extra work on systems and networks we normally rarely touch. ooooo..kay….
• My team (which used to be 6 people including yours truly) was shrinking to 4 people. One of my guys decided to leave to pursue his former career (before getting into IT), and one was moved to the field ops unit as well. Ouch!
• There was some major higher-level-management stress going on about achieving targets, which really, really didn’t help. Sigh.

So…the overall conclusion: we were getting more work, and we were going to have to do it with less people, under more stress. Never a good sign I thought.

Let’s just say it has been a very, very intensive first three two weeks (not helped by the fact that 2 of my remaining guys were on holiday at the same time for two of those weeks) which at several times made me seriously doubt staying in this company. And then getting job offers left and right at the same time…well, let’s say it has taken some determination to stick with it. But I did.

In retrospect I must say that I quite proud that we’ve pulled through. The two weeks with just A. and me to handle the work and stress was no fun, also because we could only handle the top-priority stuff and not really get some structural work done, but now that E. and K. are back we’ve stabilised the whole thing again. Everyone has gotten used to the new structure (well mostly, anyway), and my manager K. and his boss H. have actually been very good about everything: always honest and open about what was going on and understanding about the pressure we were under. I must thank A. for his great contribution and thank E. and K. for stepping up to the plate and handling a *lot* of stuff once they were back.

Life is slowly returning to normal again, which frees up some time for a social life again. Yay.