It’s the apocolypse
I went into the doctor's office yesterday to check on some routine middle-aged ailment and as part of the routine checkup they took my blood pressure. It struck me as a little bit unusual when the nurse blanched and retreated from the room, and as even more unusual when the nurse came back and re-took my blood pressure, just in case.
Apparently a 140/102 blood pressure is kind of high, as in "you need to come in so that we can look you over and get you onto high blood pressure medicine" kind of high.
The alternative is, apparently, to radically modify my diet to a less fatty, salty, and sugary one. And to "reduce stress."
Hmm. None of these are particularly compatable with being a computer programmer, particularly the last one (I've been fighting with trying to get Linux working on a collection of new IBM core dual(tm) servers, including one that doesn't bother to attach the PCIe interrupt line to the PIC on the box. This last one is fun because it's really hard to boot off a PCIe scsi card when our (UP boot kernel, just like the one that R*dh*t ships for this allegedly "server-proven" piece of hardware) Linux never gets any IO interrupts from it.) And it's not as if things are likely to get any better, because we do esoteric things (like, um, booting off a storage network. I highly recommend this, by the way -- if your server lets magic smoke out, it's simply a matter of moving a fiber channel cable and waiting 3 hours for the fsck to finish) that apparently nobody else in the world does.
But I digress. Even though it doesn't appear that there's any negative effect, even when you've already got hypertension, of "moderate" tea or coffee consumption, there's still the teeny trouble that absolutely nothing in my job description makes it easy (or even possible) to reduce stress, and since it's computing, we're located close to junkfood but far away from non-junk food (it's one of those health and safety requirements for programming jobs), so I need to go a long ways out of the way to get to food that won't kill me. Oh, and apparently "moderate" tea consumption is about what I drink by 10am on a good day. Ooops.
Thus it's the apocolypse. It is theoretically possible to juggle computer work, eating non-junky food, and not consuming caffeine-bearing substances while helping (in my pitiful way) to herd a flock of babies, but it's not something that strikes me as particularly easy or, um, nonstressful.
Perhaps I'll win the lottery. Time to buy a lottery ticket.