This week has been a real doozy. At work, our “weeks” generally run from Wednesday through Tuesday for our weekly production cycle so I’m now coming to the end of the craziest week of my 17+ years. We had been presented with data feed inputs to enter that were all riddled with errors and in a way that all our normal comparison methods were rendered unusable. While we had the first set of inputs provided to us in October, they were so bad that multiple people on the team had to be called to drop what they were doing JUST to report source data errors we could report back to those who created them. That part took weeks. We bumped from one deadline to the next solely due to the poor quality of the inputs. But now, this Tuesday is the BIG DAY!

So for the last week, I (and others) have been in a mad scrum to ensure our product was entered and fully tested so it could be released in as good a shape as possible on the promised release date. Many of my tests were going to provide results late in the day last Friday, so I had already planned on working most of the weekend to make sure I was prepared for any final changes to arrive on Monday morning. However, I ran into a problem on Saturday when I woke up…

My internet was down.

Normally, my husband is the technical wizard around the house but he was on his periodical writing sabbatical this weekend. I did what I could do, which is unplug and reboot the router, but nothing happened. Of course it might also be helpful to know that we were in the middle of a pretty big storm with quite a lot of wind starting after midnight on Friday, so it wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world to find out that some utility wasn’t working. I’m just glad our power stayed on! We were having 45-50 mph wind gusts!

So I did call dear husband for some advice and he was able to find out that the cable company was aware of the outage in our neighborhood and anticipated having it fixed by 5pm. I already had some girl time planned with a friend in the evening so with that news, I quickly determined that working on Saturday simply wasn’t meant to be.

Honestly, it was only painful for a minute or two and then I reoriented my day around a completely different set of tasks. I spent some time cleaning the house, cooking and doing some errands including getting my Covid booster and treating myself to a Dutch Bros coffee drink afterward, which I almost NEVER do. As an aside, if you ever find yourself in a sour mood, go to a Dutch Bros and just interact with the staff taking your order or the server at the window. You will come out of that drive through with a whole different (better) mood (and a coffee), I promise.

In other words, sometimes the universe is telling you to rest, take a day off, recover. Listen to the universe. Keep your mind open. Instead of trying to control, manipulate and drive ahead, sometimes you need to slow down. There is often wisdom and beauty to be found when we listen to the signals. The universe told me in no uncertain terms that I would not be working on Saturday and message received. Instead I had a wonderful, restful, quiet, restorative day. And the cable finally came back on sometime after midnight, so I would certainly be able to put in my time on Sunday, which I did.