It's all going wrong again

I'm getting depressed again, after a couple of months of being kind of okay. The darkness doesn't help, but it's more than that I guess. At work I'm sat on the opposite side of the floor to my team (and it'a a big office) on the edge of another team whose work is nothing to do with mine. I was supposed to move to sit with my team five months ago, but someone higher up in another team is playing office politics and I'm being used as a pawn. Not even my director can get past her and organise my desk move. I keep asking for work to do, but I'm a techie working in a team of administration type managers and they don't understand that I can do technical stuff quickly and they're managing to fill 1/3 to 1/2 of my time. I'm currently upset because there's a major change in the one programming job I do and instead of me being sent on the course, one of the managers decided that he wanted to go when he didn't understand what it was. He didn't bother to turn up for the first day of the course and doesn't understand it because it's computer programming.
I'm currently feeling very lonely as I'm stuck on my own with no-one to talk to at work and when I go home I only really talk to people over the internet. I don't think it's even talking to people that I miss, but just being around friends. My best friend just moved over 100 miles away in September after getting married and I miss her being here.
The thing is I can't even see anything that I have to look forward to and that's the sort of thing that tends to keep me going.

Hey,

The darkness is certainly getting to me too. However, at least it's not getting darker any earlier - i.e. it has reached the 'tipping' point, and will now start to [hopefully] gradually drift back to having more light. It should be bright outside now - In summer it would be. When you go home, try to have as may lights on as you can, and maybe play some music too. I constantly either have music playing or the TV on, because the silence is 'deadening' here. Also, when people drift out of my life (such as your friend who got married), I try to see it as a chapter of my life that has closed. The new chapter is what you desire it to be - i.e. you can make decisions and dictate what happens 'afresh'.

Regarding the work situation, there are too many who have a competitive attitude in offices, I have noticed. In addition, you have the standard human beings there who don't seem aware of the emotions of others around them. They slam doors on your face - happily - and wouldn't think twice about robbing you blind if they could get away with it. These types of people are to be expected wherever we go. You are clearly a kind-hearted person, so please try your best to just get your head down and do your work as was dictated to you when you joined the place.

Take care as always,
Kevin

Thank you Kevin, I'm sorry to hear that the darkness is getting to you too. I do put all the lights on as soon as I get home and I'm considering getting one of those light box devices to see if it might help.
I won't close the chapter of my life that is my best friend though. She's been my friend for 16 years, we went to university together, lived in the same house for 2 years and by quirk of fate ended up living a mile from each other again for seven years. I've had a good few 'fair weather friends' over the years, but she isn't one of them and she means an awful lot to me.

Chucky wrote: please try your best to just get your head down and do your work as was dictated to you when you joined the place.

I do wish that were possible - it's not a case of me not 'getting my head down'. I don't have the kind of job where there's a constant stream of work day in day out that just simply arrives. Each piece of work is different and my manager is supposed to ensure that I am given sufficient pieces of work to fill my time. I have asked for more work repeatedly, but for some reason she isn't requesting enough work for me. She often works from home and it's hard to get a response from her sometimes. It got to the point yesterday where she asked me to change four columns on a spreadsheet - two which didn't need changing, she just didn't correctly understand what they did and two in which I had to rewrite a single formula and then copy and paste it down the column. That was it for the entire day. I don't think she does it on purpose because she's a nice person, but I'm being so severely under used that the boredom is affecting my health.

In case you're wondering, I'm applying for every suitable job going in our technical department. I do know that's where I'd be best suited, and I was told that I'd have got the last one I interviewed for had a candidate internal to the department not decided he wanted a change of jobs. I just have to wait for suitable jobs to get advertised and hope they get a bit more frequent.

Very well.. it seems that you're like me and need to be kept occupied all of the time? If I go in knowing that there's nothing to do, I feel uneasy and unwanted. Thankfully, there is often too much to do in both my research/work and my personal life. In fact, I could do with having more hours in the day, preferably ones of light and not darkness.

Are you finding that your 'old' friends have families now and are less likely to go out? There are still 'singles' out there, and plenty of them as much as I know. Think about this: have you been asked to go out with a particular group of people recently but rejected them for whatever reason? If you have, then maybe you could have gone to see what happened. Life's about taking chances and risks. We must do these in order to better ourselves, right?

Take care,
Kevin