BoB's Blog

A fair few people have asked me why I've taken a week off staff and I can't seem to settle into an answer. There are all kinds of little reasons and none of them are negative towards the staff of EoFF or my relationship with Danielle.

I can understand how people would jump to those conclusions, I suppose, but it's simply not the case for either option. I've not been unhappy with staff, in fact I've been quite happy being on staff and I enjoy it far more often than not. As for Danielle, we're great. We're about to get married, and it's a pretty exciting time, I gotta say. These next few months may be stressful but when it comes to how much I love Danielle, nothing has changed - I love her every day, with all I have.

My reasons are less obvious (although some are still easy conclusions to come to). I'll try to list a number of them here, as best as I can.

I wanted to focus more of my time at EoFF on getting to know people without having the titles of Administrator and Developer sitting above my posts and messages. I often get the impression that some people spend more time looking at those titles than they do considering me as a friend or a person. This goes for both those on staff and those off of staff. I wanted our chats and our messages to be more focused on being social than anything.

I wanted to test myself and see if I'd lose my trout. Being away from staff, not knowing what is going on in the staff forum, not being able to do "my job", it's always something I've wondered if I could handle. So I wanted to give it a go.

I want to rely less on the staff forum. I find myself posting there so much. I wanted to see if I could keep up my high, regular posts without the reliance on the staff forum. This also rather unintentionally forced me into reading more threads in more forums, and creating a few threads I would not have probably started if I was spending my thinking about staff duties. Kind of ironic considering that I always feel that one of the top staff duties should be encouraging discussion, huh?

I wanted to continue working on avoiding stress. While I feel I'm out of my stressed out state, there have been occasions where small things have made me snap straight back into it and I realise that it's not such a simple thing. I felt that doing all of the above things, and avoiding staff duties in general, would help me ensure that the stress doesn't creep back in once more.

I wanted to have a break. Just to have a break, to know that I've done it. It sounds a little silly to many of you, I'm sure, but having been on staff for as long as I have, knowing I check into staff every day of my life, it feels right that I have a little break.

There are more reasons. I won't go into them here, but they aren't as important as the above ones, as much as I like to make a big deal about small things. In an ideal world I'd just come and go as I please but I know very well that staff doesn't work like that, and I opted for one week off while having a chat with a good friend (cheers man) who set my mind at ease about reasons I shouldn't take a break.

The length feels about right. I would love to have gone for as long as I wanted and take it one day at a time, but there are good reasons for me returning soon.

As for how successful my break was in achieving all of the above... I'm mostly happy with how it went, really. Whether or not that means it was as successful as I'd like it to have been, well, I don't know. I'd say it was about 80-90% of the way there, at least. It was a good thing.