Feeling A Little Stressed

National Blog Posting Month – January 2014 – Pressure

Prompt – Which of your responsibilities stress you out the most?

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Ah! Here’s a fun one. What responsibility gives me the most stress? For this one, I’ll focus on work-related tasks. That’s where most of my stress resides, anyway.

In general, the tasks that give me the most stress are those that involve interacting with other people. Yeah, social anxiety kills me all the time. I manage to overcome it. E-mail helps a lot, because I can compose what I want to say, mull it over, then send it off, rather than being on the spot and making only bizarre farting noises with my mouth.

The other thing that stresses me out terribly is making repairs to the mass spectrometer. Sure, I’m the local expert. I’m the only one on campus who knows how to change a filament or empty an ash tube. I’m also acutely aware of everything that can go wrong any time I do any ‘quick’ maintenance on the mass spectrometer. And things going wrong usually cost 100’s or 1000’s of dollars. Yeah. It makes me feel a little sick.

Other than that, work is easy and stress free. Well, unless I have to write something technical. But that’s another post.