The Armchair Politician

I’m pretty overloaded right now between work and school.

Although, somewhat refreshing is that, for the first time in a long while that I can think of, I’m really enjoying my school assignments. They’re pretty difficult, and most of them time-consuming. On my plate so far:

1. Prove five statements in computational theory. Completed, but took about an hour and a half per problem.
2. Write a userspace threading library for Linux. Pretty difficult, and unlike anything I’ve done before. I have 10 days to do it in, and I hope I can manage to finish it by that time.
3. Learn LISP. In two weeks. I’m finally at a level of Computer Science where they expect to be able to tell you to learn something on your own, and have you actually do it. This is something I’ve been waiting for since my first day at KSU.
4. Build props to use as test obstacles for our DARPA Urban Challenge entry. This whole project will take roughly the entire semester, but it boils down to us getting to play with and test Georgia Tech’s entry: Sting, a Porsche Cayenne.

On the other hand, work has been grinding me with no end in sight. No matter how much I do, I continually get more piled on. I don’t blame them — we’re increasingly short staffed, and being off at school doesn’t do anything to fix a customer’s immediate problem. But I’ve told them I’m only going to work twenty hours a week, and only two days. Well, they’re okay with the two days, but apparently I’m needed at least 12 hours a day. And some hours during the school days.

For example, today. I check my email at school, and notice that our support team is having issues with a site I made a customization to. They found the problem on Tuesday, but never really conveyed to me the seriousness of the issue. So, I see a bunch of emails that have gone around since this morning trying to diagnose the issue. I’m sitting in a class, and I decided to try and see if I could help at all. At Kennesaw State this wasn’t such a big issue, because most of the classes there were trivial; I didn’t pay attention more often than not. But in graduate school it’s a completely different story; I need to listen to the professors, and pay attention to lecture, or I won’t be prepared for the tests. The lectures usually don’t cover material in the book, but supplementary knowledge we’re expected to know to succeed in the class.

At any rate, this was the wrong move. By replying to an email and attempting to diagnose the problem, I suddenly get sucked in. I’m asked to write up documentation about the customizations and deliver it to another team so they can continue their efforts. I, quite simply, don’t have the time to do that during the school day. It isn’t going to happen. Yes, the documentation should have been done back when the site was first customized, but this was done under severe time contsraints at the last minute, like most of our projects end up being. I’d gladly go back and complete documentation on it if I had any time whatsoever (and no, I don’t consider time in class to be eligible) between projects to do so.

I get an email about an hour later from a very pissed-off manager asking why this hasn’t been delivered to them, and to call him as soon as I receive the email. Of course, by this time I’ve closed my email client and don’t notice it until 10PM tonight, just after I get home from school. I can’t help but consider the sinking realization that if I’d just let them figure it out by themselves, I wouldn’t be getting flak from all directions for not being able to devote all of my time into fixing it.

So what’s it to be? Do I continue to be “generous”, and try and help fix problems even when I’m off-hours at school, or do I simply forget about it until the next day? I wish I could say I still saw any benefit in the former.