Stress, Missing Time, and Spam — A Personal Trifecta
The past three weeks have been one big blur. I find that stress for me almost immediately translates into a need for comfort food and sleep. While my insomnia is still a problem, about every three days or so I sleep nearly the clock round. On the other hand, work doesn’t go away just because you’re worried about something. The zines still need to be kept on track. Books entered into the databases. Books sent to the reviewers. Reviews proofed. Reviews sent back to reviewers for revisions. Books read. Reviews and other materials written. Then there’s the added problem that some slimball spammer has forged the identity of one of our domains and is blanketing the world with spam seemingly from us. We’ve checked with the tech support gurus and found we’re not sending the spam out, our servers have not been hacked, our email addresses haven’t been compromised, because so far the complaints from receivers of this spam have not even been in our email database. The worst thing is that we can’t do anything about it except suffer the consequences. Until the spammer moves on to trash another victim’s reputation, we can only suffer and cringe and do our best to continue to protect our databases and accounts. Adding to the frustration is knowing that we did protect our readers and subscribers and our software but that doesn’t stop anyone from pretending to be you… So, if you’ve gotten any of this spammer’s spam, we’re sorry and we truly do feel your pain because it’s nothing to the pain we feel. I just don’t understand the mindset of people who would do this. If they believe they must forge headers to get in under the spam filters, then they have to know they are doing wrong. They must all have faulty morality circuits in their heads and/or hearts. Anyway, in my muddle headed-way I’m trying to cope with getting the next issues of Gumshoe Review, SFRevu, and TechRevu ready to go. Did I mention we’re in the midst of moving to a new host? We are, in fact, one of the zines was locked today, and no work can be done online until the DNS transfer is complete. Hopefully, this will allow me to catch up on the reading part of my job which has fallen a bit behind this month as I occasionally realize that quite a bit of time has past and I haven’t turned the page yet. I think stress also steals time — I’m thinking of putting together a study on that and seeing if I can get funding. However, I’ve been informed that an N of 1 is not sufficient for a good study. Don’t see why not since I notice there’s a lot of funded studies out there with Ns as low as 6 (particulary in medical studies). I think that’s why getting access to the actual research reports is so difficult in many cases (but that’s a long post for another day when I have more concrete time in my days).
Anyway, I’m curious about how others deal with stress — other than to run screaming in the other direction if there is a directional component to stress.