create one pair of hands, my true thinking of the current situations

src/content/blog/one-pair-hands.md

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+---
+title: "One pair of hands"
+description: "On carrying everything alone: the tickets, the silence, the grief, and the people I can't quite reach."
+pubDate: 2026-04-14
+tags: ["burnout", "work", "personal", "reflection", "grief"]
+category: "reflection"
+---
+
+*by LATTE*
+
+There is a version of being needed that feels good.
+
+Trusted. Relied upon. The person who knows how things work.
+
+And then there is this version.
+
+The version where you are needed because there is simply no one else.
+
+---
+
+## When the team became one
+
+A few weeks ago, I became the only helpdesk.
+
+Not because I asked for it.
+Not as a temporary arrangement with a clear end date.
+
+Just. One by one, the others were gone.
+
+And the tickets kept coming.
+
+I am now the SPOC. Literally.
+Single point of contact.
+Single point of failure.
+
+The irony is not lost on me.
+In IT, we warn against single points of failure all the time.
+We build redundancy. We document. We plan for outages.
+
+Nobody planned for this one.
+
+And nobody asked if I was okay with being it.
+
+---
+
+## Everything is urgent
+
+The thing about being the only one is that the word *urgent* starts to lose its weight.
+
+When everything is code red, nothing is.
+
+But the pressure behind each ticket is still real.
+The frustration on the other end of the phone is still real.
+And I am still one person with one pair of hands.
+
+People do not see the twelve other fires when they send me the thirteenth.
+
+They just see their fire.
+
+I understand that.
+
+It does not make it easier.
+
+I come home tired.
+I wake up tired.
+And somewhere in between I go back and do it again.
+
+Sometimes I think my brain is running like a server with no load balancer.
+Every request hits the same node.
+Eventually something times out.
+
+I am getting close to that point.
+
+---
+
+## The invisible work
+
+Let me just say it plainly, because I never do.
+
+**People**
+Onboarding and offboarding. Login issues. The full user lifecycle from day one to last day.
+
+**Microsoft 365**
+User management, groups, roles, permissions, conditional access, MFA.
+Mailboxes, shared inboxes, distribution lists.
+SharePoint sites and permissions.
+Intune: enrollment, monitoring, compliance, remote wipes.
+
+**Devices & assets**
+Maintaining the asset register. Replacing and swapping devices.
+Building the full kit for every new colleague: laptop, phone, SIM card, bag, accessories, fully set up and ready for day one.
+
+**Logistics**
+Ordering hardware through our supplier. Shipping packages when needed.
+Managing SIM cards for secondment staff.
+
+**Tickets**
+Triage. Creating, updating, routing. Keeping everything current.
+Being the bridge between the helpdesk and every external party.
+
+**Everything else**
+Network advice. First-line security checks. Answering the phone.
+Escalating the things I cannot fix. Not showing that it costs me anything.
+
+None of this is one job.
+
+This is what four people were doing before.
+
+And now it is what I do.
+Alone.
+Every day.
+
+The machine keeps running, so people assume the machine is fine.
+
+The machine is not fine.
+
+The machine is one bad morning away from an unhandled exception.
+
+---
+
+## The people around me
+
+Here is the part that makes it harder.
+
+I cannot even put my weight down somewhere.
+
+My team lead knows. He sees it.
+But he is fighting his own battles right now, getting close to his own edge.
+I care about him. I do not want to push more onto someone who is already bending.
+
+His boss knows too.
+He is going on vacation tomorrow.
+
+And then there is the functional management team, the people I genuinely click with, who actually check in on me.
+They are buried too.
+
+The BI team lead sometimes stops by.
+Asks how I am doing.
+And I freeze a little.
+Because I do not know what to do with someone who asks.
+So I smile and say it is fine.
+
+It is not fine.
+
+But I do not know what he can offer, and I do not know how to ask.
+So I stay quiet.
+
+I look around and everyone is already carrying too much.
+And somehow that makes me feel like I am not allowed to put mine down.
+
+Like my weight would just crush someone who is already on their knees.
+
+So I hold it.
+
+---
+
+## Him
+
+And then there is him.
+
+Someone at work I keep thinking about in a way I cannot fully explain.
+
+I do not know if what I feel is real.
+I genuinely do not know.
+
+My honest thought is that maybe my system is just running a process it does not have the right dependencies for.
+That after months of carrying everything alone, something in me is just reaching for whoever feels steady.
+Whoever has capacity.
+Whoever seems like they could hold something without breaking.
+
+And he feels like that.
+
+But I do not know if that is a feeling or just a symptom.
+
+And I cannot ask anyone.
+So it just sits there, unresolved, taking up memory I do not have to spare.
+
+---
+
+## The people I miss
+
+I have friends.
+
+Good ones, I think.
+The kind worth having.
+
+But after a day like this, I come home with nothing left.
+No energy to reach out.
+No words that are not already spent.
+
+By the time I could call someone, I am already too tired to explain why I needed to.
+
+So I do not.
+
+And the distance grows quietly, the way memory leaks do.
+Not all at once, just a little at a time, until suddenly the heap is full.
+
+I miss them.
+And I feel guilty for not showing up.
+And I am too tired to fix it.
+
+All three things at once.
+
+---
+
+## Him, still
+
+There is someone I lost in December.
+
+He was my everything, and I mean that in the way that actually has weight rather than just sounds like something you say.
+
+He was my world.
+
+And since then I have just kept going.
+Work. Tickets. Systems. Problems. More tickets.
+Never a moment to actually sit with what it meant to lose him.
+
+There was no room to grieve.
+There still is not.
+
+So the grief just travels with me.
+Into the office. Into the evening. Into the backyard at night when the music is on and I am finally alone enough to feel it for a second before exhaustion takes over.
+
+Some days it feels further away.
+Some days it is right there, sudden and specific, like a process that never actually closed.
+
+I miss him.
+Still.
+And I think that is allowed.
+
+Even when there is no space for it.
+
+---
+
+## What I do instead of falling apart
+
+I let it pass over me.
+
+That is the only way I know how to describe it.
+
+I do not run. I do not panic.
+I just let the wave come and try not to drown.
+
+It works, mostly.
+
+But it costs something every time.
+
+And I am not sure how much is left in the tank.
+
+By the time I get home, the version of me that walks through the door is not the full version.
+It is whatever survived the day.
+
+---
+
+## Evening
+
+Tonight I sat in the backyard with music on.
+
+A playlist called koffie huis.
+
+Nothing urgent. Nothing that needed me.
+
+Just the air, and the sound, and a few minutes where I was not a critical dependency in someone else's infrastructure.
+
+Just a person sitting outside.
+
+Tired.
+Carrying things.
+But sitting outside.
+
+It was enough.
+
+For now, it was enough.
+
+---
+
+## Why I write this
+
+I do not write this for sympathy.
+
+I write this because I could not say it out loud today.
+Or yesterday.
+Or the day before.
+
+At work I smile. I say the queue is manageable.
+I do not tell anyone that I come home exhausted and wake up the same way.
+I do not tell anyone about the grief I am still carrying.
+I do not tell anyone about the confusion I cannot place.
+I do not tell anyone how much I miss my friends, how I just cannot reach them.
+
+I do not say any of it.
+
+Because I do not want to add my weight to people who are already carrying too much.
+Because I do not have the courage to be this honest in the room.
+Because I was raised, in some quiet way, to just keep going.
+
+And so I do.
+
+But not here.
+
+This blog, this site, these words.
+This is the only place I allow myself to be loud.
+
+No one here needs me to be okay.
+No one here is waiting for me to fix something.
+
+So here it is.
+Unformatted. Unresolved. Still compiling.
+
+I am tired.
+I am grieving something I never had time to grieve.
+I am confused about feelings I cannot verify.
+I am missing people I love but cannot reach.
+I am showing up anyway.
+
+And I hope, I really hope, that is enough.
+
+---
+
+*some things do not have a clean exit code.*
+*sometimes you just let the process run.*