Welcome And Why IT Stress Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Simply Resilient Conversations. I'm Jeff Burke, Senior Technology Advisor at Object First. This week again, I'm gonna be talking to myself. Well, not talking to myself, talking with myself. Hopefully, there'll be more than just myself listening later on. And the reason I'm doing this is because I wanted to talk about a very important, in my opinion, and something that's sometimes overlooked, especially by upper management, the stress factor of working in IT, specifically in operations or support or areas where you're on demand and what this does to you. How do you deal with it? And actually, I'd actually be interested in hearing from people later on about what they do. So you go to the YouTube, for instance, of this podcast, where you can find it on my YouTube channel, you know, post a comment what do you do to relieve yourself from stress and what kind of stress are you under now? Is the stress factor changing in IT? I don't believe it is, although I haven't been in operations now for about three years. So let's talk about this. And for people, for instance, who have never worked in an IT position that has stressful demands, and I'm not talking about stress like every job has. Every job has a certain amount of stress. Your boss will give you an assignment, you have to do it, you run into difficulties, and you might have family stress around you, life stress, you know, financial stress, uh, stress with stuff going on in the world, you know, COVID takes over the planet, that kind of stress. So there's a lot of different stresses. And let's remember one key factor here is that uh we evolved as humans. Uh originally, stress was like you're walking around and suddenly a tiger shows up like once a week or once a month, and you have a lot of stress while you deal with either running away or doing something, climbing up a tree. I think tigers don't climb up trees, but either way, our modern life, and I've read this and seen this on YouTube videos, our modern life, it's as if we have tigers every five minutes surrounding us. Tigers, if you're, you know, in public transport, people who drive, you know, stress there, stress with events, it's just constant. And then we're so smart that we invented these little things called phones, and we decide to make these new stress vectors. When you think about it, your phone is a stress vector for attack, it's a it's an attack vector for stress. I mean, the pleasure you get out of it, get out of it, and the the usefulness is also tempered by the amount of stress it causes you. Just go and look at the news. And I saw something yesterday which said, under no circumstances when you wake up first thing in the morning, look at your phone. Do not do that. Five minutes, don't do that. Like jump around, do some exercises, have some glass of water, don't look at your phone. So we live in a very stressful world. It's a much more much more stressful world than, for instance, our ancestors lived in. And this is obviously taking a toll. Now, when you add into that, working in a position where people can call you, or there's emergencies constantly having to deal with. So, this could also be like in the fire department, or you're working in the ER in a hospital. Positions where you're suddenly your stress resolution level goes way up, uh, and it's out of the blue. So you never know what's gonna happen. It's not like it's planned. Okay, we're gonna have an outage today, so guess what? You're gonna deal with it.

unknown 3:18

No.

Help Desk Stress And Ancient Hardware

Servers Law Firms And Midnight Reboots

BlackBerry Trap And 24 7 Work

Chat Pings And PagerDuty Pain

Quitting Alcohol As A Crutch

Single Focus Hobbies Beat Multitasking

List Your Stressors Build Simple Plans

SPEAKER_00 3:20

So, a lot of different stress factors out there. How do we do it, deal with them and and and what do they look like in IT? So, first of all, people who have never dealt with this in the sense of in IT stress. Let me tell you some history of my work in IT and the type of stress that I deal with. And I think a lot of people out there who do work in IT will recognize these things and might even chuckle a bit, or maybe not chuckle because it's not a pleasant memory. When I first started working in IT, I obviously, like many of us, worked in a kind of help desk position. And especially back when I started, computers were relatively new, especially for the older generation. And I would get a lot of really, let's let's face it, annoying phone calls by people who I mean, that wasn't their fault. They just could not learn this new technology. And when something broke, it made them very angry, they become frustrated. And who can I take my frustration out of? Well, there's that guy, Jeff, at the help desk. It's his fault, right? That my screen isn't working or my my exchange isn't, you know, not my exchange, the angel of obviously Microsoft Exchange, but their email client isn't working. But I saw some real doozies and things that drove me crazy. Uh, one was now some of you might know this is ancient history. The mice, the old mice used to have not to have the mice in your house, hopefully not in your house, but you know, your mouse, right? So in the olden days, the mouse actually had a physical ball inside of it. So it didn't have this infrared thing that you got now. And so you'd play with your mouse, you know, you you know, doing your things, whatever you're doing, and that ball inside of the mouse would accumulate dusk, dust, and crap. And after a while, your mouse would stop working correctly or do funny things. And so the idea was you would turn, uh, there was a thing you turned, and then you could pull the ball out, you could clean your mouse and clean the inside of that area. And some uh people, and this is always a situation with IT, you'll have some people who are scared to touch anything because they think like it'll blow up or something, and then you have people who aren't scared to touch it, but basically end up blowing things up because they know what they're doing and they're too adventurous. So there's two types of, well, there at least was back in the day, two types of users. And so I literally, and I'm not joking, had people who would phone me at lunch, complain their mouse was no longer working, this is like unacceptable. I've got work to do, you know, you guys aren't keeping the system up to date. And I'd come and I'd look and the ball was gone. Okay. The ball was gone from their mouse. I said, Well, you've gotten a ball in here. Well, I don't know, someone's stealing it. I go, why would someone steal that? It was kind of a rubber ball thing inside of the mouse. Why would someone steal that? So I knew what had happened. They'd gotten frustrated, but they were more adventurous, and they opened the thing up, clean it, and like happens with round things, they drop it and it rolled off somewhere. So they thought they'd play smart or play stupid and just pretend it's not working. Okay. Then there's printers. So anyone who's worked in IT at a help desk remembers the hatred of printers. Printers will always break down at the worst moments. It only got worse when they started creating these printers that do everything. Okay. It prints, it scans, it makes your coffee. That made a billion more things could break. Printers will always break down at the worst moments. And I remember getting calls, you know, 5 p.m. I'm gonna leave. Oh, printer's not working, run upstairs and like fiddling this with this thing for like an hour trying to fix it. There was that. And then there was just the annoying phone calls. Uh, people phoning because, for instance, uh something really simple, they didn't they didn't know how to close their application or they didn't know to do this or the other. So that created quite a bit of stress, but it doesn't come into even comparison to when I got promoted and started working with servers. The level of stress then increased paramount. Why? Because as I said recently at talk, I've never been on an IT team, which has been overstaffed. So I've never been in an IT team where we've had time playing some cards, you know, whatever. No, it's always been catch up, technical debt, catch up, technical debt. And the issues you had to deal with were just unbelievable. One of the toughest environments I ever worked with was in a law firm. I worked as a system administrator in a law firm. And I'd say right off the bat, that's when I realized that human intelligence is divided into categories. Uh, I used to think that people were just smart, but there's different types of smarts and they don't always mix. In fact, often they don't. Lawyer smart and techie smart are two different smarts. Okay. The one thing about lawyers was they love to work all night long. I guess if you're getting that kind of money an hour, and you know that when you're dealing with lawyers, one of the reasons why they like to talk to you the first time, they're so nice, and they all these emails is their software that every time they send that email or they're on the phone for a certain amount of time, it's going ding, ding, ding, and that's the dollar sign or the euro sign or whatever that's going up because they're spending time with you. Of course they're very nice. I'd be very nice if every call I was on, I was getting money for it. So, what does that mean? That means they do not like downtime, not at all. We would warn our lawyers a month in advance that we're gonna do updates in a month's time, and this will require a reboot of all the servers, not all at once. We actually would time, send out times, this server rebooted at this time, and these services will not be available. We need like 50 servers. Then two weeks before, we'd send the same thing out again. We ask, does anyone have a problem? Is some big deal happening or something like that? Again, and then literally an hour before, and remember, we weren't doing this at five in the afternoon. This was always at 11 p.m. at best, mostly at 12 or 1 in the morning. We'd send another email out saying, Okay, get ready. Here's the schedule of the reboots because of the updates, and it would start. Phone calls. What are you doing? I got this super deal tomorrow. This is worth tons of money, you can't do this. And it was always a huge war. So, on top of normal IT stress, there was also the human factor stress of these people getting annoyed. They've been warned, they've been warned, they've been warned, didn't matter. And of course, if if you like happened once, updated the server and then it didn't come back up, and you back this back when you had tape backups, okay? There's no instant recovery. The recovery was like instant in 10 hours recovery, uh, you were entering a very serious world of pain. And I'd been there before. And you have to remember, if you've been working all week long, nine to five, just nine to five in IT, it's pretty tough. It's tough, it can be pretty draining. And then if after that you suddenly have to work all night long, I it's it's it's not depressing. I don't I don't think a word is created for this this kind of situation you're in. Depression is probably the upper end of the scale and lower down it goes. So that was a major problem, and I never got used to that. Now, in different types of companies, it was easier. So I worked in a technology company, it was noticeably easier because the technology that we were selling, these were also technical people, they didn't have anything to do with IT, but they understood that you know you had to do reboots, you had to do updates, and so it was easier. There was still pressure, but it was different. Getting back to the phones though, and the stress of the phones, I'll never forget my first interaction with one of these. I called them annoyance phones or stress phones. And it was done in a very sneaky manner. I won't name the company, of course. I think all companies did, anyways. They introduced the BlackBerry, and they introduced it to their top CEOs, their CEO and their top um C-suite, and then some top managers. And what they did was they came to the ID department and they said, you know what? We've been thinking, you people are so special, and you know, you work so hard. We're gonna give you these two just to try as a trial so that you can try them out as well. And we idiots thought, yes, one, oh wow, this is great, you know, pat on the back, egos grew. I mean, I'll all I was younger, okay, I will admit it. I pictured myself, you know, in the bar, in the pub, in the restaurant, and everyone's around me, and I take out my blackberry, I'm talking on it, putting on a kind of semi-annoyed voice because I'm a very important thing I'm getting with, or furiously typing away while people watch me thinking, wow, that person's got a blackberry. So I was seduced by this. What I didn't understand, it didn't hit me right away, although it did pretty much when they turned it on and gave it to me, is that you are now attached to your work 24-7. Yes, you can go and show off to people and you know have all these people look at you and go, wow, they must be important. But in reality, you're not important. You're actually the hired hand, you're actually the idiot who's accepted this thing and now cannot get away from it. What followed was Armageddon. Literally, people would phone us at any time. There were no ground rules, nobody thought about this. HR was just not, I don't know where they were. And so emails, uh, phone calls all the time. This isn't working for minor things. And it was only after three or four months uh when we were all just literally collapsing our desks that management brought in some rules for people that you know, after 5 p.m., unless the comet or the asteroid is literally a few miles away from the office, don't phone IT. So I'm certain a lot of other people got caught with that as well. And ever since then, every place I've worked, I've had a phone and I've had some kind of communication. Later, enter in the chat. Okay, phone was bad, email was bad, but there were techniques. The first technique you would use was, oh, I ran out of power, darn, you know, and there was no power bars back then. Ah, what can you do? It's it's it, you know, like so what all these things would come at us and we would counter them with something. It wasn't that we were lazy, we're trying to survive basically, uh, until we finally got some feedback for our arguments. So, yes, that it's out of power or I'm out of range. So back in the days and some subways, like in Toronto, partially, your communication doesn't work in the tunnel, right? And so the old trick was, oh, I was stuck in the tunnel, right? In fact, that trick's been used for for decades because even when they were just pay phones and you were late coming home, you'd say, Oh, this train was stuck in the tunnel, you know. What could I do? I was freaking out, but you know, alas, it's like um, of course, now in some countries they solved that problem by you know allowing the mobile phones to work in tunnels or introducing technology. So I don't know where you're gonna hide now. I mean, you'd go under the lake, I guess. So, yes, the the the chat was even worse because the instant messaging created a whole new, I call this an attack vector. Because emails you can avoid by saying I had other emails to deal with, and you know, the common priority, and if it's not important, and and for someone to actually put a super important uh exclamation mark on an email, they really have to be watched. Uh, you know, like uh, you know, my Word document, I don't like the the uh the spacing, you know, X exclamation mark, come right away and fix it. That's only a few people would do that. But chat, instant messaging, huh? It's in your face, it pops up. That's a whole new area. So what do you do with all these things? And how do you deal? And then other stresses, I go on forever when it comes to IT. In fact, uh the the pagers, uh back in the day there used to be pagers, and and I saw some people really destroy pagers, like drop them in the sink or some other places where there's a lot of water. Uh, but then of course there's there's pagers now called like programmatic pagers, pager duty. There is an app out there called pager duty, and it acts like the old school pager, which is extraordinarily annoying. Um, anyways, I think everyone understands what these things are and probably have dealt with them in the past. So, what do you do apart from playing games? Because that's not a solution. Remember, you know, saying you're stuck in the tunnel, you can't be in the subway tunnel all day, or you can't be um, you know, up on a mountain or out of range. I know some people in rural areas had great, great situations. Like, for instance, I was in St. John's uh for a Veeam user group meeting. Oh no, it wasn't it was a hands-on lab we did, St. John's, Newfoundland, and there's these great trails there, uh great and they're right next to St. John's City. And in some part portions of these trails, there's no cell signal. So I guess you'd go and go there and have a picnic for like five hours and say, well, I was having a picnic. But let's face it, these are all games of cat and mouse. It shouldn't use that. So, how do you deal with this? So, first of all, one thing I learned very early on that couldn't deal with it until the COVID pandemic when stress levels went through the roof, was helpers. Helpers remove the helpers that don't help. And the biggest one that I find well found with myself was alcohol. I was not an alcoholic, but after a tough work week on a Friday night, you know, I go have a number of beers, whatever, that wasn't helping because the next morning you'd wake up, you might have a hangover, but the problems haven't gone anywhere, and so they're 10 times worse. So all it did was buy you at a very high cost, and especially now what they're seeing with um health issues, a kind of you know, escape. But then you're brought right back to reality the next morning, and it's very unpleasant. So during COVID, I realized we were locked down here in Toronto, and I realized that everyone was drinking a lot more. There was nothing to do, there's no bars, no restaurants, and it was recycling day that did it for me. I walked out on recycling day and I looked at our street, and the recycling mountains were enormous. And I thought to myself, my goodness, this is not a way to deal with this new stress. So I decided to stop, and it was the best time to stop because there was no restaurants, no bars, no nothing. And it worked. Now you will realize after that very quickly that your social life will change quite a bit, and the circle of friends you were with before might change. And it's silly reasons, jokes aren't as funny as anymore. So I remember going out with some friends literally two years after COVID. I hadn't seen them, everyone was busy with family and whatnot. And we went out and they were having, you know, their few beers, and I wasn't, I was having my and that's a strategic strategy if you do too. I mean, you can only drink so much Pepsi Light until you turn into whatever. So you've got it, like, okay, I'll have a you know, tomato juice, I'll have this, that, and the other. But after a while, they start telling jokes, and they just weren't funny. And you have to pretend you're laughing, and you realize these aren't funny jokes, they weren't offensive jokes, they just were dumb, you know. Like, look at that tree. Oh, yeah, that tree's loving. I mean, it it was that bad, and so I just didn't hang out with them anymore. So that is something you have to keep in mind. It does change your interrelations with people. Apart from that, I started doing some other things. I started doing some Tai Chi, some more um concentrated on single things. And what I mean by that, and this I got from the Tai Chi, but also from running when I used to do marathons, but I never really figured out until now. If you can do something where your attention is fully focused for a certain amount of time, even if it's 15 minutes or 20 minutes, all of your attention is fully focused on one thing. This is great if you're into hobbies, if you like model building, for instance, or knitting. So people make fun of knitting for so many years, or I don't knit myself, but but think of it. If you're knitting, you've got to concentrate. It's actually quite, you know, or sewing or anything like that. You have to concentrate. You can't just, you know, just do it whatever way you want because it'll become a mess. So you have to concentrate, you have to focus. And while you're doing that focus, you're working, but in a way you're not, because you're focusing your entire energy and your mind on one single thing. And let me ask you this: how often do you do that, especially if you're working on IT? Rarely. How much stress is created from you trying to multitask? An enormous amount of stress. And so just doing these things once in a while, it could be building shipbuilding, it could be painting, anything, will you realize that right now I am totally focused on this? Now, some people say, well, I'll do this, you know, with my AI or you know, I'm learning Kubernetes. I get it. The problem is that's too close to what you do. This really should be something outside of your professional, um, direct professional engagement because otherwise you're you're gonna it's gonna blend in no matter what. And so find that thing. It could be anything, it could be just sitting on the beach and looking at the sky. I mean, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. If you give your mind a rest from the constant having to shift attention from one thing to another, you will feel the benefits. But also, not only from a rest point of view, that you're gonna be resting your mind, but also you will start to see that when you are doing your tasks, your work task, you'll be much more focused and you'll find that you're able to do more, even though you think you're doing less because you're not jumping around like a grasshopper everywhere. And the reason being is that we do not work very well when we multitask. We need our full attention to be able to work effectively. And so if you focus on certain tasks for a certain amount of time and then focus on the next task in the same manner, and then the next task, at the end of the day, you will have produced more and more quality. So that's one thing I highly recommend. Now, what other things can you do apart from some kind of a hobby, you know, changing your focus? I think what's really important too is to, I mean, they talk about the life work balance, but life is stressful too, so that's an issue, right? Life is not like when people say, Oh, your life work balance, they're assuming your life is just this great time, you know, on a sailing boat somewhere. No, life can be even more stressful. So life work balance is important, but I know a lot of people who run away to work to get relief from life pressures, so you got to keep that in mind. That's not a motto which covers everything. I think the most important thing is for you to understand yourself and your situation and to enumerate what you are dealing with. Often we have things affecting us and we don't record them all because they just become kind of enormous, stressful things. So if you have a relative who's sick or a parent who's sick, or anything you're dealing with, enumerate. Say, I am dealing with this issue, I am dealing with that issue, I'm dealing with this issue. In fact, I would even recommend to write it down on a piece of paper. Old school, I know, but it's very effective because again, it's gonna focus your attention on it. When you enumerate all the different things that are causing you a lot of stress, it's easier then to separate them and then deal with them one step at a time. One of the most stressful things about stressful things is the feeling. Of being overwhelmed, a feeling of things coming from all sides at once, and you're trying to back them off, like someone's throwing a million tennis balls at you, and you've got bracket and you're trying to pick them all back. What you need to do is enumerate each one of these stressful aspects and then do the step-by-step approach calmly. What can I deal with now? What can I do in situation one, even if it's one step to slightly alleviate that problem? And then go across the entire spectrum of these things affecting you. What you'll find is incrementally over time you reduce all these chaotic, stressful factors hitting you. That's my opinion. That's what I've been using, and it has helped me significantly, especially as life gets more complicated and gets crazier. The other thing, too, to remember is we cannot predict where our new stress factors will emerge from. That is one of the toughest things about life. If we knew that, yeah, tomorrow, uh, you know, my bike or my car is getting a flat tire, okay. No, it never happens that way. It'll happen out of the blue, probably at the worst possible time. And you have to prepare yourself for those situations. And the best way to prepare yourself for those situations is, of course, to prepare as much as possible. And this goes back to our whole IT disaster recovery planning. People say, well, you're a worry warrior, you're always thinking about. No, it's not a question of just worrying for the case of worrying. It's a question of try to enumerate or to list things which could potentially happen. Not everything, you know, well, an asteroid fall in my head tomorrow, but within reasonable, you know, doubt things that could possibly happen and have a little plan. What would I do in this situation? What would I do in that situation? What would I do if a stressful situation emerges right now? Start simple. I'm sitting here doing my five minutes, and some stressful event happens right now. How do I deal with it? How do I react? And then go from there. So that's my take on stress. Have I defeated stress? No, and never will. It's gonna be an ongoing battle forever. But there are different ways to deal with stress. There are better ways and worse ways. There are ways that create more stress, and there are ways that are detrimental to your health and to your family life and to your existence. And the key element is to find the ways that keep you going and keep you able to deal with stress and don't affect others or yourself in a negative manner. Okay, that's enough for this month. Next month, we're gonna try to get an ASEAN because this is an ACES podcast. So we will talk to you in I can't believe I'm saying this, May. Thank you.