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

2026-04-14 18:38:04 +02:00
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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.
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 ## 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.*