Total nervous wreck

I pride myself of being a person who works well under pressure. When the stakes are high and the time is short I know how to keep my cool, focus on the job at hand and take the time necessary to assess the risks and, if possible, avoid them. However, the last three days I have been a total wreck waiting for the results of the presidential election.

Photo: pixrepo

There are three contributing factors to my disturbed state of mind: on the one hand, the stakes of the election are very high. When Donald Trump seized the presidency against all the predictions in 2016 the world changed significantly for the worse. It is not that the I was particularly happy with the politicians and their undertakings, recently very full of partisanship and with very serious shortcomings in the area of actual dialog, but at least most of the decisions has some reasons behind, reasons that I might not agree with, but reasons in the end. But under "the Donald" many decisions seem to have been taken on a whim, out of pure gut feeling, without any regard for the costs or the consequences, and that is very dangerous.

The second factor is the time: in most circumstances even the most  significant electoral process have a reliable result within 24 hours. I do not mean to say that the authorities did a bad job, because counting over 150 million votes is no easy feat, but I have the impression that the amount of mail ballots simply exceeded their wildest imaginations. They probably adjusted the staff to a "normal" election and suddenly found themselves with a flood of votes which, to make it worse, could not be processed until election day. Sitting three days nailed to the CNN is simply too much for anyone, watching the votes coming in in the hundreds or a few thousands when there were still millions of votes to be counted has been nerve wrecking.

The third factor is the feeling that there is nothing urgent waiting for me at work. If the situation had been different, I would have pushed myself to work, and indeed I did so the whole Wednesday. But since we delivered the updated command sequences I have not been able to focus on the work because my head was spinning around the election.

Hopefully, at some point over the weekend we will have a credible result, and with some luck it will mean the end of a dark age. If I only get to make one contribution to reduce (locally) the entropy of the universe, let it be this post, which has been extremely hard to put together. Good luck to you all and I hope we all get to enjoy the weekend.