Starting the day early with barely six hours of sleep.
A long work day filled with what felt like endless meetings.
Not getting a point through to a colleague regarding some urgent work.
Someone finishing my entire bowl of nuts on my desk while I stepped away for a meeting.
The worst part? I had to file a security incident report and my work laptop got locked down because I was in a hurry working while eating lunch and accidentally entered a malicious curl command from a fake homebrew website.
Sounds like the worst day of my life.
Yet I didn’t cry, didn’t break down. I was frustrated, I was annoyed, but I kept my cool, relatively. Because the support made the difference.
No-blame security reporting. I reported the incident, and the security team helped me and reassured me that I am not the first, nor the last, victim of such an attack. They also tried to keep me in the loop with each step of the analysis and follow up actions. It sucks that I have to use a temporary laptop while the original is isolated for further analysis, but it is what it is.
The colleague? I tried going through point by point to find out where the misunderstanding was, and realised we were on the same page, mostly. The last part was resolved by him finally understanding the missing piece of information together with the help of another colleague. Everyone fully on the same page.
The nuts? Annoying, and a violation of boundaries really, but I just got myself another bowl from the pantry. Not worth getting angry over. Different cultural interpretations of hotdesking, fine. Nowhere near the worst (which is another story from half a year ago by itself).
The long day? It ended, things got done. I went off to Tech Leadership Circle and facilitated the Open Spaces session, taking the topic of Security in the Age of AI. And what better way to start the discussion than with my own security mistake? The discussion was good and the post-meetup prata was delicious.
The support - nobody, colleagues or otherwise, blamed me or made me feel bad about my mistake. In fact, everyone was supportive and the general attitude was “it could happen to anyone of us”. It made me feel better. But of course, the best support was the short call with my wife that made me feel like I wasn’t alone.
Ten years ago, I would have crumbled and broken down. Ten years later, I am not perfect, but I am stronger.
I lied in the title. This was definitely not the worst day of my life. The worst day of my life would not end with me still feeling awake enough to write after 15 hours out of the house, and feeling as happy as, if not happier than, I was in the morning.
But the next time I have a bad day, I will definitely try to remind myself of what I learnt today.