Had an extremely shitty work week two weeks ago due to 4 of the 12 people in my work section being off all week, one due to vacation and the other due to minor injuries, a death of a friend, etc. Valid reasons, sure, but that doesn’t make the massively increased work load all week any easier, and by Friday I felt so overwhelmed at one point I excused myself in the bathroom and cried for a minute. That never has happened to me before due to work or stress, but it was just too much for me at the moment especially when I find half my co-workers and supervisors either lazy or semi-incompetent and I often have to pick up the slack.
The extra sting to all this is this is the week that my parents, my sister and her family were all vacationing in a nice summer home on the East Coast (US) and I was unable to join them because due to various people retiring last year the percentage of people in my work section who could be on vacation was lowered and as such every single work week in the summer was already taken as I have the lowest work seniority in my section despite having been there for 16 years. And my sister and her husband are both teachers so they can only vacation during the summer.
So yeah, an extremely stressful week that could have been the exact opposite, not exactly fun.
Doing better now. Last night my friends and I finally got to play Dungeons and Dragons again (started playing for the first time a few months back, but this is only our third session due to schedule conflicts though everyone should be free for a while now). Was a ton of fun, even better now that we have proper maps and the particular quest we were on was way more interesting than the first two. Also got two natural 20s in the final combat of the session, which did 20 and 28 damage which is huge for level 3 characters (I’m playing a rogue, and the Sneak Attack ability really does serious damage especially when it’s a critical). And some of my friends who were struggling with the rules (like one of my friends made Constitution his dump stat which is almost a death sentence, so he’s only 15 HP at Lv. 3 while I’m double that) but I think they’re getting the hang of it and things are flowing better. Since 2020, I’ve watched like 50 episodes of Critical Role so I kind of had to help the DM explain certain concepts to the others they weren’t getting at first.
