My Last 5 Days On The Consulting Job

Liz, a long term reader of my personal site commented on my previous post I wrote “a century” ago,

” Hi Christine, You are probably too tired to read what we are saying, let alone act on it… “

Yep! She was right. I was pretty much spent after I left that building last Friday, physically shaking and mentally frightened that someone would chase after me for more work.

If you guys still remember, my co-worker who was brought onto this project to support me walked out of the job without any warning. As the result, in addition to my regular work on the plate, I also had to redo his job, train another person, write all turnover documents and meet with client’s technical groups to transition my work in the last 5 days. Physically I pushed my body to work till AMs without enough sleep and skipped a few days of lunches to accommodate all the meetings, deadlines and groups of people lining up by my desk. Mentally, I was sick and tired of fighting and negotiating with my project manager on the things I must do. He was so unreasonable to the point that he started to pick on me for working so many hours which made him look like a slave drive while still asking me to deliver this and that. I can deal with long hours, but I can’t deal with long hours plus politics at the same time.

I thought about just dropping everything like my co-worker did. I thought about going back to my hotel room and just not care about the contract deadline; I thought about writing an angry email to my project manager and his bosses how he mismanaged the project. But out of a sense of responsibility or who knows what, I didn’t do any of those. Instead, I sat in the cold hard chair in the middle of the night and worked, cried, and worked , and worked…

While I was too tired to work, I scanned through the comments you guys left on this site and thought about how in the world I ended up in this kind of harsh situation.

I know I blamed this job for the mess of my personal life. But deep down, I know that I am at least partially responsible for what have happened – I didn’t take control of the situations and that is also why I was slaved in the last 5 days. Although the slavery is over, for the record and future reference, I would like to write a series of lessons learned, a few of which inspired by the comments left on this site by some fine ladies and gentlemen. I hope that through this exercise, those of you who have gone through the similar situations can stand up for ourselves and start to take control of our work and lives:

Here is the list of the “lessons learned” that I will be posting in the next a few days

1. Learn to admit “I Can’t Do This”
   Setting the limits, boundaries and expectations by admitting that we are no Superman (or Wonderwoman)
2. Learn to Betray The “Agreement”
   Fighting against the unreasonable expectations and patterns we have accepted(Kayll has an awesome long comment on this subject )
3. Learn To Believe “It’s Not My Fault”

No more guilt traps when it’s someone else’s mess to deal with.

4. Learn to Walk Away From A Bad Situation

Even if it takes 50 steps to get out of a bad situation, it is better than not taking any step.

Thanks to all Blog Fabulous’s friends for your support and your fabulous comments!