There’s almost always something running.
Not a crisis. Crises are rare and they have a conclusion. This is all the other things – the escalation that’s been climbing since Tuesday, the one not quite closed before the next one opens.
A queue that never quite empties. You learn to hold more than one. The thing from this morning, still warm. The thing from last week that went quiet but didn’t go away. The new thing, the one everyone’s suddenly asking about, that’s really just taken its place in the line behind the others.
The rare afternoon when nothing’s live feels strange. Almost suspicious. You find yourself checking for the thing you must be forgetting.
The job was never the absence of things running. It was being the one who holds them, steadily, while they do.
The people around you only ever see the one they’re working on, not the ten you’re carrying behind it.
Nobody sees the carrying.
That’s the point of it.
By the end of my roles doing it, the noise had become normal. It was the quiet I found strange
