Back to the Grind

I like my job, I really do. That seems to come as a great surprise to a great many people, but I honestly love my career in high tech.

I like my vacations, too. I'm just back from a week at the beach, and as always, it's taking a while to slip it in gear. While on vacation, I'm on a complete media and technology black-out. No iPod, No WiFi, no laptop, no Blackberry. There's a TV at the summer beach cottage (which we rent from my father), but I don't even turn that on. World events come to us by way of a curious, low-tech marvel called a "newspaper" -- which I fetch each morning by walking a half-mile (round trip) to a nearby roadside market.

At the beach, I totally immerse in being a kid, with my kids: building sandcastles on the beach, playing bocce, tossing frisbees, and surfing. I do a lot of reading at the beach, more than I do at home, but not from a Kindle. Instead, I haul these heavy, clunky things called "books" in my beach bag. Unlike the online media that I read all through the year, these often have nothing to do with high-tech.

This week I read The Good Guy (Dean Koontz), You've Been Warned (James Paterson), and Duma Key (Stephen King). These aren't book titles that I, necessarily, would have selected from a bookstore -- but they were all hard-cover books that had been left on the cottage book shelves by previous tenants. I did enjoy the first two, I found the Stephen King book to drag on too much.

I love the beach, I love the "escape", but it's really hard to jump back to work. Keep in mind my opening to this blog post -- I love my job, I love the work that I do -- but after a full week of being completely unplugged, it's surprising to me how hard it is to get back to work.

Examples:

- When the alarm clock sounded, I had no idea what it was. The "beep, beep" of the alarm was associated as a truck, backing up, outside my window. I was getting extremely annoyed at the truck driver, who was taking so long to back-up, until I realized that it was an alarm clock.

- Leaving the house this morning, I tried to get on my bicycle, rather than in my commuter car. I had strattled the bike before remembering that I don't work close enough for cycling to work (I wish!). I was still in beach mode, heading out for a morning bike ride.

- My computer is an alien thing to me. I couldn't even turn it on. Instead, I made office visits to the "usual suspects", to see what happened at the office the past week and what they felt needed my urgent attention.

I worked from pen and paper for a good chunk of the morning, and I'm slowing booting up. This blog gets the first attention of the day, but there is a pile of 705 email messages waiting for me next. Back to the grind ...