Anticipation.

Worrying.

Stress.

Anxiety.

Excitement.

I’ve spent the last week playing a game of Wheel of Fortune where the options are one of the above. I give it a push: stress. A harder push: worrying. Am I going to get excitement? Nope. It’s the equivalent of the tiny sliver of triangle with the $10,000 on it. For now, I’m stuck with the others.

Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s a day to pray. Don’t believe in God? I don’t care, pray for me anyway. Have you ever wanted anything so much you can taste it?

I have. I do.

I tend to believe that things happen for a reason. If you truly, really work hard to get something and you can’t get it, maybe it wasn’t meant to happen. That might sound like I believe in destiny, but it’s not exactly that. I guess it’s just that knowing it might be something more than my not getting it makes me feel better. Self-deception, baby, I’m all about that!

Is it better to have tried and failed than to not have tried at all? Do you really want to put yourself out there over and over again? Is it about aiming or is it about enjoying the achievements?

These are the thoughts that are dancing in my mind. I don’t have the answers. I’m not even fully thinking about the questions. I’m not thinking about much right now. Can you tell?

Cross your fingers. Toes.

I want this!

Previously? Don’t Pass Go.

The radio pierces through my dreams.

Or maybe it’s my nightmares, I never seem to remember anymore. We’ve come a long way from the days when my college roommate, Holley, used to holler “Karen, it’s your fucking alarm!” Now, Jake turns from one side of the bed to the other and I’m wide awake. I don’t dream anymore. I don’t really sleep anymore.

The radio is yelling. The dial is in between stations, but close to one so that the music mixes with static. The volume is turned up so high that it makes me jump out of my skin. I pound the tabletop savagely until the room is once again silenced. If I keep my eyes tightly closed, I can postpone the inevitable.

At least for another seven minutes.

The radio comes alive once more and I show it who’s boss. But it’s not whipped into shape, it takes only another seven minutes for it to commence its nagging. I pound it twice more before I give up. At this point, I have eight minutes to make it out the door. But I don’t jump off the bed. I lie there with my eyes open, staring at the patterns on the ceiling.

As a child I always envied the kids with stars on their ceilings. With my less than stellar eyesight, I was unable to see my own hands at night, let alone a pair of florescent constellations. After my eye operation, I went out and bought a set of my own. Now I can stare at star whenever I wish to, even in New York City.

Even at nine A.M.

I finally drag myself into the bathroom, eyelids shut. Reaching for the bubble gum toothpaste, I move my arm up and down and side to side, like a well trained robot. I take my time because I know that I will need to open my eyes to brush my hair and I’m not ready just yet. I can hear the minutes ticking. The fear that I might have a 9:30 meeting grips me and I drop the toothbrush, wash out my mouth and comb my hair within a split second.

I race back to the bedroom and thank my lucky stars that I shaved last night. The long black skirt picks me and I throw on a white shirt and dig into my black shoes, I grab my bag, throwing in the keys on the way out. I yell back to the birdie, “See you tonight, Cupcik.”

Hailing a cab, I check my wallet and the time simultaneously. 9:15, I’ll make it in on time.

I dig into my bag and pull out my second most precious electronic item. I press play and turn the volume to twenty. The music takes over my soul.

This might be a good day after all.

Previously? The Need for Speed.

I had an important meeting this morning.

I usually don’t work on Mondays but this issue had been bothering me for quite some time and I knew that the Managing Director only had a few available hours in the week and I knew the matter could not be put off another week.

Or I might have blown up.

For someone as emotional as I, conversations about a discomfort with current project setup tend to be complicated. Most often, by the time I get to make the appointment, I’ve been obsessing about the problem for quite a long while. Since I tend to involve my emotions and make a mountain of small issues, I always need to step back and disengage my feelings. I need to make sure there is a real problem before I start asking people to notice it. Not to undermine myself, I am pretty observant and intuitive, so I do often notice real issues before they become major disasters.

The problem is, I have a real hard time turning off my feelings. I remember how my emotions totally spiraled out of control by the last year in my previous job. There were so many unfair, unprofessional and unacceptable situations that I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the problems. The lack of prevention and resolution was mind-boggling.

A most common scenario would be my walking into my manager’s office to professionally bring up an issue that needed his help. My manager was so dense and so incredibly bad at understanding people that he would choose the worst possible way to handle the situation and within minutes I would either be extremely frustrated or in tears.

The thing is, no one will take you seriously if you’re crying. People tend to take crying as a sign of weakness. While I agree that crying is not professional and should not necessarily be done in a manager’s office, often times tears don’t mean that there isn’t a real issue beneath all the strong emotion. But crying isn’t going to get you the results. And it all comes down to resolution. If you’re not in your manager’s office to get the issue resolved, you should be talking to friend, who’s going to listen to you and offer words of consolation.

I’ve learned that the best way for me to control my emotions and ensure that I stick to the problem at hand is to write things down. Now, before I go to a meeting, I make a list of points and valid complaints. I walk in with suggestions on possible tracks of resolution. I try to come up with examples to back up my arguments and recommendations. And I keep telling myself that it’s not personal. It’s not about me. It’s about the project.

So today, I walked into the office, stated my case and we had a productive and professional conversation about it.

And I didn’t shed a tear.

Previously? Unconventional.

I’ve been thinking about work a lot lately.

About why I do what I do that is.

No, I’m not independently wealthy, and yes, I know that I work so I can make money. But I also know that there are a million, billion ways to make money. So I guess I’m not talking about working as a concept as much as my actual job itself.

I graduated college, that’s university for my British readers, almost five years ago. Upon graduation, all too sad to be leaving the breathless beauty that is Pittsburgh, I moved to New York and joined an investment bank, which I still work for, as a programmer.

In my first three years, I worked on multiple projects, all on the UNIX platform with the amazing Motif GUI libraries or the even more fun TK ones, and coded shell scripts, perl scripts, and C code. I traveled to London several times, and even lived there for a few months because of a major project. I learned a tremendous amount in those three years, mostly from the very intelligent people in my surroundings.

My department also had an overwhelming amount of evening and, at times, weekend support work, so I spent what easily qualifies as obscene hours working.

In my forth year, I was asked to go to Tokyo for an extended business trip. Two of the team members there had recently quit, leaving the group in a very difficult situation. Since I’d previously worked for that manager and knew him to be amazing, I seriously considered the offer. Six months without Jake in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and one that was incredibly far away both from New York and Istanbul, seemed a bit insane.

But I decided it was exactly what I needed. I was having problems with some of the people I worked with and there was way too much politics going on in my group in New York so work-wise it was the best alternative at the time. And I figured that if Jake and my relationship couldn’t survive a six-month long distance, it was better to find out now. I also decided I needed to challenge myself. I needed to find out that I could live without Jake, if I had to, and that I could go to a totally foreign country and make it just fine.

So even though just about all of my friends recommended otherwise, I accepted the offer.

And it turned out to be one of the greatest six months of my life. I loved the people I worked for and with, even the work I did was more fun. I got promoted. I learned not only more about coding, but I can also now speak Japanese. I was totally unfamiliar with Japanese culture and had never been to the Far East. I found out that I could do on my own just fine. My relationship with Jake got ten times stronger. And I decided that as soon as I returned back to the States, I would change my job.

I came back to New York on May 19, 2000. The very next day, I flew home to Turkey to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday and my twin nephews’ first one. While there, I decided that what I really wanted to do was work part-time. I wanted the time to do other things. I wanted to go to museums. I wanted to volunteer. I wanted to take more classes. I wanted to enjoy life more. Read more books.

I came back to New York with the intention of looking for a part-time job internally until the end of the summer and if I couldn’t find one by then, I would look elsewhere. People kept insisting that there were no part-time positions in the firm and that I would end up having to quit. And of course that wasn’t the case. I had several options and finally accepted the job that I currently have.

Now I get to write an application from scratch. That’s a dream job. Most people in companies like mine get to fix or enhance other people’s code. My team and I get to decide our database schema, our system flows, our platform, the languages we’ll use, and even the GUI layouts. To top it off, I only work Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

Sounds perfect, right?

Well it was. It is. But I still spend many of my days asking myself why I do this. Is this what I really want to do? What do I want to do? And I can’t get the questions out of my mind.

I love coding and I don’t see myself ever giving it up. I write code for myself, for my friends, and for Jake. But I also want to feel like my work helps others or the world in general. I want to make more of a difference. I want to work with people who will challenge me. And I also want to work from home. I want to be able to work in my pajamas. I want to have my own hours.

And, of course, the question that keeps recurring is: Why don’t I?

Why don’t I just do it?

Previously? Criticism.

Each time I go to another “for women” meeting, I get more and more disappointed in members of my gender.

As a way of celebrating Women’s History Month (which pisses me off in so many ways that I won’t go into it) my firm organized a session on women and money. I ran to the session twenty minutes late cause I had a meeting, so I can’t vouch for the first part of the meeting. But the second part gave me enough frustration to last a few weeks. It also confirmed my suspicions that I must not be female.

The first thing the presenter does is ask people what their parents taught them about money. Several hands go up. Women say: “My dad told me never to pay on a date.”, “My mom used to sing ‘Daddy’s coming home, he’ll give us all his money.'”, “My mom told me to marry rich.”, and this went on and on.

Holy Fucking Shit! Is this the 21st century or not? Every single woman in this room is working at quite a prestigious firm, so we’re not talking people who went to college to find a husband. Or why would they be working?

My mom never graduated high school. My father never finished college. Both have worked pretty much every single day I’ve been alive. Neither ever told me to make the man pay or that I’d never be able to make money on my own. I don’t mean to imply that my parents never disagreed about money. They fought all the time, even though we were fortunate enough to have enough to go around.

My father used to hate the enormous phone bills so much that when my sister and I were teenagers, he had machines installed on the phone lines to cut us off after three minutes (cost multiplies in Turkey every three minutes so the longer you’re on the phone, the more you pay). It wasn’t that we didn’t have the money to pay; he just got irritated by how much we took advantage of the situation. Most money related issues were handled similarly. If we really wanted something we got it but not if it was merely caprice. For some reason, I don’t think that either my sister or I never took anything for granted. We never assumed that all we wanted could be ours. Even now, we’re more likely to not buy something than go crazy with shopping.

So I don’t know whether my parental education on issues of money was any healthier than other people’s but I was never ever told that I would need a man to provide the cash in my life.

The presenter says that a large population of women fear being a “bag lady”. Huh? She claims this is a common fear in wealthy, professional women. Huh? Maybe I’m snotty, but I have never ever had that fear. Or anything equivalent. Is that cause I’m fortunate enough to have a family who’s financially secure? Nope. I know better than to assume that money today has any guarantees. My parents could get sick and that money would disappear literally within days due to doctors’ fees. They could make bad investments. There are a million things that could go wrong. I could even lose my own savings overnight and be forced to start from scratch.

So what? Don’t I still have a brain? Even if all technology jobs dried up and I couldn’t get something in my field, I could learn a new skill. How is it that women question their capacity to mold to different situations? And don’t even get me started on the presenter’s opinion on women and math. I’m so sick of women becoming victims and I’m even sicker of women who victimize themselves.

I have many fears, but the ability to make money has never been one of them. It seems that makes me a minority in my gender.

What a shame.

Previously? Unspoken.

Jake came home last night and said he wanted to take me out to dinner. Since my back got real bad, I’ve been spending almost all my free moments in bed, so this was a refreshing change. We walked over to this little Italian restaurant in our neighborhood and sat for a cozy meal.

I started talking about my struggles at work. I seem to be one of those people who takes everything to heart. Everything is extremely important and everything is personal. As I explained the situation I’m having at work, he told me that I can’t do everything. He talked about redefining my ideas of what makes me successful at my job. He explained that even if my project becomes a major failure in my eyes, it might be seen as a huge success by my users and managers. He’s right, of course. Sometimes even if I’m aware that I didn’t do a detail in the perfect way, it doesn’t affect the system in a visible way and no users are disappointed.

Working for a corporation, especially one whose main line of business is not technology is as much about politics as it is about building systems. You need to make sure that you lose some fights so the user feels like he’s getting his way even if what he wants is wrong and you know it. Even if I build the most amazing system that functions in the most efficient way possible, if no users use it, the system is a failure. The trick is to make everyone feel like the system was especially built for them while not giving up the idea of building it the right way. One of the reasons I am building this system is cause the two other systems that are supposed to function in the same way were both built with a narrow-minded focus and they are inflexible.

As I explained to Jake last night, one of the reasons I went part-time a few months ago was to use my time more efficiently. In the last four years, I had to put way too much face-time and it drove me crazy. I’m happy to stay at work until the wee hours of the morning if I have work to do, but during the quiet times, I like to leave early and do the million other things I’d rather be doing. I figured that if I only worked three days a week, I’d have more to do on those days and I’d stop feeling like I was giving up my life to make money. I am delighted to say that I was right and my new schedule is fantastic. I get tons of work done and I can take eight classes a week and spend a day volunteering. I get to use my minutes more wisely and feel much more fulfilled.

As a side effect to this new belief system, my ideas of success seem to have morphed as well. Since I have sort of taken myself off the road to quick stardom and upward mobility, I am less concerned about whether others think that I did a good job. I want to do things the right way. At least, I want to know what the right way is and then make it an active choice not to go that way (if there is a decent reason) . I don’t want to work just to make money, I want my work to push me to learn and to challenge myself. Otherwise, I’m back to wasting time. I’m not saying I don’t care what the users think or whether my team members agree with me, I’m just saying that I don’t want to do things the sloppy way. I want to feel good about my job. I want to feel like I learn, like I make a difference, and I want to be proud of the quality of work I deliver.

It seems that’s too much to ask.

Previously? Help Me!