Stress - That uncomforable feeling that you are about to be found out

I guess that Australia used to be remote from stress. The time zone difference means that the rest of the world is working when Aussies are asleep. So if Head Office in London is getting annoyed about something, they can't just pick up the phone and yell at you. Likewise, in the days of sea travel, post would take a few weeks to get here. So the news that your lamb was unsold and you faced financial ruin would probably have been made redundant by the outbreak of World War II.

Unfortunately, we live in a globilised, electronic age now of mobile phones, blackberrys, the Internet and E-mail. We are contactable and downloadable twenty-four hours a day and as those devises are awake all day, we are supposed to be too.

My day kind of sums this up. Before going to bed, I checked the blackberry, (or crackberry as it known by the geeks in Financial Services who try to laugh away their addiction). An email from my solicitor in Ireland caught my eye. I'm trying to sell my house in Dublin and my attempts to do so are like trying to collect confetti in a hurricane. Property prices are falling like a Man United forward in the opposition penalty box. I have a potential buyer, but my solicitor is doing everything in his power to frustrate matters. He is either an unreconstructed Marxist and believes that all property is theft, or he is desperately trying to justify every stereotype that people have about lawyers. A bad lawyer can drag a case out for months. A good lawyer can drag it out for several years more. But no more legal profession jokes. Lawyers don't think they are funny and the rest of the public doesn't think they are jokes.

So I toddled off to bed with extra pressure on my addled mind. Instead of counting sheep, I'd be counting how many needles I'd like to stick into that solicitor's eye. But unfortunately, you can't sleep on an empty stomach or a full mind and I was up to 3 million needles before I dropped off.

When you work for a global organisation and are based in Melbourne you can more or less judge what your day will be like from the morning email inbox. This includes the overnight tirades from the US and Europe as well as the endless rubbish that is churned out by end of day systems around the world. I like to read a book and listen to some angst ridden female vocalists on the tram into work. But increasingly, I'm drawn to the little red flashing light on my crackberry. I tell myself I'll only look at the personal mails, which will tell me football results and rude jokes about dead celebrities.

But once you're in of course, you can't help looking at the business emails screaming urgent and critical. Senders know that they have to include these words in the heading in order to attract the attention of readers. But they take the English language to extremes. Critical to me means that somebody is about to lose an eye, or that a meteor is heading for your house in the next 10 minutes. But in business it is used for anything that is vaguely outside of the ordinary. A fax that had to be sent twice because the line was busy the first time. An internal report that printed on yellow instead of white paper. An email to a client that didn't say regards at the end. These are the sort of mundane issues that fill up inboxes on a daily basis but are given greater importance by the language used. As a result, it's difficult to filter the real issues from the make believe ones.

Except this morning that is.

When you see 64 emails on the same subject, you know that fun and games have been happening overnight. A quick perusal tells you that your day will be miserable and you haven't even reached the office yet. An overnight computer job had failed. This job sends a report to a bunch of people who have no interest in receiving it and don't read it when it arrives. Today they got it four hours late. In the greater scheme of things, you would think that's not that important. But in the big business world, we set ourselves useless goals and targets and then beat ourselves up when we don't meet them.

So I spent the first two hours soothing angry souls and providing explanatory emails to the world and his brother on a subject I didn't understand. Then I had to start the normal day. This consists mainly of conference calls, which are a means by which lonely people can have conversations. They serve no other purpose. In any normal conversation (save perhaps domestic disputes), only one person talks at a time. While they natter on, the other nineteen or so people on the call will dream of lunch or stick the phone on mute so that then can surf the Internet. Conferences calls prevent you from doing any normal work, so the Internet is the only alternative to listening to the mind-numbingly boring statistics being discussed. When it comes to your turn to speak, you have generally forgotten what you were going to say and most of the listeners have lost the will to live.

Then it was off to explain the day's issues to the boss. Churchill once said that the three most difficult things for a man to do are climb a wall that's leaning toward him, kiss a woman who's leaning away from him, and deliver a good speech. I would rather attempt the first two than explain an ugly days issues in a speech to my boss. But as there were no walls or ladies present, I had no option.

Outside the sun is shining and all the benefits of living in Australia await me. Unfortunately, to live here you have to work and to deal with the stresses that work brings. But there is some comfort to be found in leaving the office after a long day and knowing that once again, you have managed to avoid being found out.