This morning as I was getting ready for work I made an interesting observation. I am psychologically addicted to my back brace. I know it may seem weird, but I am. While the brace is needed to some degree to keep my back straight so I heal properly and create good posture (after years of poor posture), I will not break if I fail to wear it. However, as I was going from the bedroom to the bathroom without my brace (I wear it all the time except for bathing), I felt a degree of anxiety surrounding the fact I was not wearing my protection. The amount of time needed to bathe when you have to be *very* careful in the shower is increased by about 50%. So my 15-20 minutes has turned into 23-30 minutes after the surgery. Those 23-30 minutes are scary when you THINK you need back support.
I suppose many people my age (or older) who have to wear a brace or cast for an extended amount of time could feel this way. I am sure kids do not suffer this as much because in their mind they are indestructible. I now realize I am a mortal and rather frail, all things considered.
I am being bombarded with some rather disturbing thoughts as of late. These thoughts are the result of 2 separate conversations I have had with 2 different people. If these conversations are to be trusted, I am pretty much "dead weight" in the department I am working in. While I normally do not put much value in hearsay, when it comes from 2 completely different people who are not in any way in contact with each other, the value goes up a bit. The core of this is true. I am very limited in what I can do in this department on a couple of levels. First, I am not a Unix guru and my boss knew that when I got here (although I think he failed to tell the TL that). That keeps me from doing what most of the other admins are doing. They have much more experience in UNIX (15+ years per admin) than I do and to add more problems, do not have the admin (known as "root" in Unixland) access needed to do even the simplest work. Second, I have just had back surgery and I cannot even do manual labor now. I am sure that is beginning to bother my boss. He was expecting me to build a couple of racks to ship to our R&D sites. I started them before I went on medical leave, but that was as far I as I got with that project.
I am not completely useless. I am helping a great deal in cleaning up some very sloppy ticket queues. I am reporting our performance, saving my boss and the TL from having to do it. It is not glamorous work, but I know how to do it. I also have been dispatching the tickets for our group. Not a hard job, but it is time consuming and frees up the admins to do the things I cannot do. I test the Linux builds the engineers are creating and I even made patch cables for the servers I was supposed to be building. My days are usually full...not much down time. I guess it looks like I have some free time since I posted twice today, but I can do this in between tickets and while the builds are loading.
I know that this is an attack from The Enemy. He loves to hit us when we are down. I also know that I can rise above this if I just pray about it. Lord, delivery me from these negative thoughts. I want to rise above all this.
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