Way too early

I looked up at the clock as I laid in bed. The bright blue light said 6:13am. I sighed in frustration and tried to turn over and go back to sleep. I didn’t need to be up till around 7:30. Just enough time to brush my teeth, grab a clean shirt, and make some coffee. I tossed and turned before I rolled over and looked at the empty spot on the bed. I hadn’t slept well without someone in the bed since Melissa and I had married four years ago. These trips of hers always wrecked my schedule. It didn’t help that Ben and I had been up last night trouble shooting last minute fixes and getting our ducks in a row.

The bright ding sound **** me to sit up. I had dumped Missy’s phone next to mine when I had crawled into bed and collapsed at around 2am. Standing up I walked over to see a message from Ben about how I should clear out Missy’s schedule for the afternoon as we would be presenting to higher ups. I would be spending most of my morning writing up the after action report. A chuckle escaped my lips as I thought of how in some companies a ‘blameless retro’ would have taken place instead of the after action report. This was certainly not a blameless situation. Ben had been sure that there would be chances for litigation based on my findings.

Looking back at the disturbed bed sheets, I shook my head and grabbed Missy’s and my phone. Making my way out to the kitchen, I turned on a few lights before dropping a k-cup into the coffee machine. Finally noticing the blinking light on my own personal phone, I picked it up. “Shit!” The curse left my lips as I realized I had missed calls and texts from Melissa. I read through the notifications.

1 missed call - Melissa

Text from Melissa - Where r u?

1 missed call - Melissa

1 missed call - Melissa

Text from Melissa - Of course u arent here when I need u

Text from Melissa - Sorry baby. I got angry cause work. Miss u!!!! <3 See u 2morrow

Looking over the timestamps, it looked like the first 5 had come within 10 minutes of each other. The last had come hours later. I set the phone down and tried to decide if it would be better to answer now and apologize, or just talk to her when she got home. Neither sounded like it would work well. I doubted even the excuse that I had been saving her second job would do me much good.

Pouring some pumpkin spice creamer and sugar into my coffee I carried it into my office and sat down at my desk. Powering on Missy’s computer, I saw that Ben was also back at it already.

Missy - Did you even sleep?

Ben - LOL I got like 4 hrs

Missy - LOL that barely counts. You need to rest sometime!

It was a common conversation between Ben and myself. Between his overemployment and his drive to grow as a manager, he was constantly burning the candle at both ends. On the other hand, even when I had been working on my career I had been more focused on a healthy work life balance. Now that I saw what life was like with less than 60 hours a week, I was hooked. I never wanted to go back to grinding like Ben seemed to love. So I always poked at him to try and get him to take better care of himself.

Missy - Messed up bad. Partner called/texted a bunch last night while we were working on the issue.

Ben - Ouch… they won’t be happy about that.

Missy - Plus with the stuff we have today I won’t be able to focus on her.

Ben - Yeah. I’m gonna need you to buckle down a bit more than normal. Also, we need to think of how to explain your new skills…

I nodded to myself as I sipped the sweet coffee. I had already thought about this part though.

Missy - Simple, we just tell them about the bootcamp I have been taking in off hours. I caught error because I was looking for an example of how a problem related to our code.

Ben - sounds good. Look, I know you saw the ping earlier, but clear your calendar. We might need your partner’s help too. We will see.

I shook my head. There was no way that Meliss would be able to talk her way through the problems and fixes that we had implemented. As the night had progressed, Ben and I had been pulling together better and better code to combat the problem. It had been fun to tag team an issue like that again. It reminded me of some of the jams I had been in before with other devs.

Shaking my head, I got to work and tried to get ready for the rest of the day.