And professionally, things aren't bad.
Well, last year around this time I had the first not so modest encounter with my manager. And his manager was not interested. So unsurprisingly in July I had another not so modest encounter, and after that I simply quit. After almost 10 years. At only 2 or 3 years to go. But I decided to not ruin my health any further. I had my last day in November including a big fat farewell party at a nice location. I will say loudly, that this manager person is not capable of being a manager at all. But anyone else's mileage may vary, of course.
A coworker pointed me to a quote attributed to Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean), but may be much older:
Distance is the only answer to disrespect.
Don't react.
Don't argue.
Don't get involved in drama.
Simply remove your presence.
And this sums the whole episode up rather nicely.
However, someone has woken up, it seems. Said manager is not anyone's manager any more. Their best friend in their management peer group was sent away, too. I have no idea, what's going on at old $dayjob. BUT --- I don't care any more. May they find new ways to thrive. It's fine without me.
So, here I am, with suddenly a lot of time on my hands. I can walk old trails. I can try new trails, physically and mentally. The "long vacation" feeling has vanished by now. And currently I do not really know, what to do with myself. Other than preparing meals to please my SO (significant other).
I decided to upgrade my server cabinet --- something that turned out a lot more complex than anticipated. But who's going to be surprised, that a grown mess of things, grown over more than 10 years (some items closing in on 20 years!), is going to be self explanatory? Not even me :-) By now I moved most services to a newer system. I'm currently exploring the details of collectd, graphite-carbon, graphite-web, nginx etc. to replace the telegraf, influxdb, grafana stack which has failed on me twice last year. Except for my email I would say, that all of this stuff qualifies as a first world problem. And even if my email were lost --- who cares. What do I gain from "Project Zero"? Well, I'm off the street and not getting into trouble. I'm preparing some long wanted documentation about said server cabinet. And I'm trying out new things. Like installing a contacts/calendar service to be used by family's not-so-smart-phones --- well, the paper thing in the kitchen will remain the master copy. Why's that? I hear you throw up your hands and roll your eyes in utter disbelief. Well, the paper thing works without electricity :-)
So much from the old bloke, who is again wondering, whether or not "this was it" --- as someone long ago phrased it.