Is working a need or an addiction to you?

{ Photo Credit : mtnwa }

Whats wrong with some people? They work so hard, wanting to achieve so much at the cost of their family relationship, friends and relatives.

When I ask some people why they work they tell me that they have to work like there is no other choice. Of course I agree to that point. You have to work. Working Brings in money which usually helps in settling those bills that we all get during the end of the month. It helps keeping a roof on your head. But the real question is how much to work? They are a few people who say that work only helps them get their minds off of things, e.g. family or relationship issues. But little do they know that using work as a cover-up excuse will only worsen the present situation to the point of breakup.

Even some say that they enjoy working, this may be cause you might be working in Google, a fun sort of environment that some tend to call home. Besides I would love to work in a place like Google. If you are not working in Google and still consider your Work Space as home then your real home must be a war zone full of land mines. Probably the moment you set you foot into your own home there would be dishes flying. Thats really funny to think about.

But alas the true example to this problem would be me. Yes. Noticed that my blog been having few posts per month, well thats because I have been sent to Hell for the past few days. Don't worry I didn't have a near death experience but something that could have really broken me apart.

Very recently One of my clients calls in saying that they had couple of printers and some palms to repair. The other day he walks in with 31 IPC Palm Printers (IPC PP-55 TX) and 21 Palm PDAs (TX and T5). I screamed inside myself "WTF". I tried to maintain a smiling face and I did pretty well. I checked in the Items and sent the client away.


It took me nearly a week to nearly sort thorough half of the printers while simultaneously handling other IT Hardware issues. It was going a bit smoothly until one fine day when I was minding my own business when suddenly our Internet Gateway machine had a hardware failure and crashed. I was frustrated. I was answering calls on my extension reassuring the users that they will have their Internet and email running soon. But unfortunately it took me 11 hours for resolve the issue. What happened in that 11 hours to me was pure torture, which even words can't describe.

11 AM - The problem started I noticed that all my mails stop working. Immediately I tried to ping to my mail server and it failed. I then pinged to Google.com but that too failed. Then I realized that our connection was down. I then quickly tried to connection to our Internet Gateway (EBOX) but there was no reponse. I then went over there, hooked up a monitor and keyboard and I checked it. The display gives a message "File not found" and the end of the boot sequence. You know what that means "Format and reinstall".

{ Several months ago I stopped using an ISA server for a Linux Based Proxy NAT server known as EBOX. Thus my Internet Gateway too I named it as EBOX }

12 PM - Started to get several calls to my extension now. Therefore I lifted and kept aside my receiver so that my extension would be busy. but alas they called to my neighbor's phone and got me to answer the phone. At the very same time one of our support pc was also down and we kept getting support calls. And support issues started pending because of one support workstation going down.

{ That support PC was having a faulty motherboard. and thus my BOSS said that I should replace it with a new PC. }

1 PM ~ 4 PM - and still I could get the setup of EBOX done properly. I finally realized that the version I was trying to install from a CD was a bit faulty. This I had to download it via the net over 400 MB ISO file.

4 PM ~ 6.30 PM - the download took a while because of very high congestion. I guess this was from SLT's side. So I burnt the image to a CD-RW and tried to install the EBOX on to the server.

7.30 PM - The installation finished flawlessly and all I had to do way reconfigure some of the other settings and filters on to the EBOX server.

10 PM - Finished all the needed setting on to the EBOX server. Also p2p traffic was also filtered by fire-walling all the ports except the official ones. Now I left for home as soon as possible.

When I got the job in this company I thought that it was all about working from 8 am to 5.30 pm from Monday to Friday but this was not the case as you can see from above. I have even given up my holidays and weekends to meet up with the pending jobs. I rarely get sick and I am grateful to God for that. But still there is always a limit to how much the human body, mind and soul can take. I feel lost sometimes and I don't know what to do? Shall I work till 5.30 pm or till 8.30pm? Shall I work on my holidays or play and relax during my holidays?

I need to work but at the sametime I need to look after myself and keep a balance between work and leasure. Without a job, I don't havea respectable position in society. But I have to work up to a limit but I can't because my schedule is filled up. Then what do I do?