ugh. work.

The last few weeks have been a nightmare of work, work, work. Last night and the night before, I was in the office until 1AM and beyond, so I'm fairly cross-eyed at the moment. In terms of workload, things ought to clear up around Christmastime, but if the gods of weather are merciful, I'll be doing a round-trip walk to Incheon and back from December 26 to 29, so once again, I won't have the mental or physical energy I need to engage in other projects, e.g., reading through a good friend's manuscript (which I've neglected for several months, now—this friend has the patience of a saint).

Anyway, I've piled up 80 comp hours thanks to all the late nights and weekends; the boss, getting antsy about my having so many comp hours, has declared he'll put me in for thirty hours' overtime pay (which won't be much: maybe W25,000 per hour, which is insultingly low; in Korea, overtime pay isn't time-and-a-half the way it is in the States, but I guess something is better than nothing), then he'll be letting me take the week between Christmas and New Year's off, plus the Monday of January 1 itself. That's another 48 hours' comp time accounted for: 78 hours total, which eats up most of my outstanding comp time.

The schedule that our R&D department has been put on has been fairly grueling since October. The idea was to complete several dozen(!) projects by early December, doing the bulk of the work in October and November. This is therefore crunch time, so everyone's putting in extra hours, even the laziest workers among us who are normally out like a shot at exactly 5PM. When we had a meeting a couple months back, the boss laid out the grand plan through summer of next year, and it appears that this project/deadline pressure won't be letting up for the next six or seven months. We'll be crunching during the Jan-Feb period, with projects due in March; we'll be crunching again during the Apr-May period, with projects due in June.

My personal workload for early next year is going to be double my current workload (twice the number of projects), and there are a few projects that might be added to the docket if the higher-ups give us the go-ahead. So we're all swamped, and it's going to be like this until June 2018, if not beyond. Not much time for personal projects, and plenty of lost weekends. Yeah... it's quite likely that I won't be signing on for another year at the Golden Goose, which has been somewhat golden in terms of pay, but not in terms of much else.