It’s been a pretty stressful week at work.
A few weeks ago I finally was handed the reins to a pretty complicated project, but it’s not been going well. I didn’t manage client expectations as well as I should (read: saying, “No!”). There were also unforeseen glitches in the coding process that caused multiple deadlines to be pushed back.
After delivering some bad news over the phone to the client today (”No, you cannot use data from a year ago if it was not ever collected in the first place”), I told her I’d check with the technical team to try to find a solution and get back to her first thing tomorrow morning.
Two minutes later, I heard the phone ring in my boss’s office. Unhappy with the answer I had given her, she decided to go over my head, of course. Unfortunately for the client, I had given her the correct answer.
Even so, I felt stressed about the whole situation. I had hoped to exceed everyone’s expectations on this project. I envisioned happy clients, happy users, and a cheerful developer or two. Instead, I’ve got an anxious client, cranky developers, and who knows what the users are going to think.
I left the office a little after 6pm, feeling very stressed and moody. All I wanted was to crank up the AC, curl up under a blanket, and devastate a 9,000ish calorie Chipotle burrito with side of chips and guacamole.
But during the middle of my commute—blasting Rihanna’s Disturbia with the top down, because I do not care what the other suburban yuppies think of my taste in music—I had a moment of enlightenment.
I needed to rechannel my pent-up frustration. Eating that tortilla-wrapped flavor-explosion-chode would make me feel guilty. Stress eating burritos solves nothing. It only perpetuates the cycle of negativity.
So instead, I changed course. I went to the gym, where I eye-fucked a thirty-something personal trainer and an extremely tan twentysomething who might have been gay or European. Afterward, I hopped over to Whole Foods to buy $30 worth of fresh organic cherries because they’re delicious and in-season and healthy and seize-the-day yada yada yada… By the time I got home, I felt 100% better.
…
When I started writing this post, I think I meant to come to some conclusion about how you can turn around your anxious energy to make it work for you instead of against you.
But instead I think that maybe the lesson here is that when you’re in a bad mood, you’ll feel better if you do something slutty and expensive.
[Ed's note: Alternative title for this blog post was 'Putting the Ho in Whole Foods.']
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