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If I could reach back in time, it would be to 2016.

And it would be to tell my late thirties self, “Don’t touch it.”

Don’t touch the service that no one else is willing to touch.

Don’t agree, out of the kindness of your heart, to provide an interim solution until the team whose responsibility it actually is gets their act together to provide that forever-promised service which never materialises.

Don’t touch it, even with a barge pole. And don’t listen to your advisors, who will soon be long gone.

Don’t touch it, because that interim solution will still be in place a decade on, and be your responsibility, no matter who you petition in the well-funded team whose responsibility it really is.

Don’t touch it because eight years on it will still be causing you sleepless nights, because its design flies in the face of everything you’re trying to achieve.

And because it stands in your way as a perpetual obstacle to your own career progression, and will absorb countless hours you do not have, removing you from your own responsibilities.

Don’t touch it, no matter how much they beg you. Be strong and steadfast. Tell them the truth: that you do not have capacity to deliver. That if this was really important to the service, they wouldn’t have cut your team four years earlier.

But, alas, we cannot reach back in time.

So here I am, stirred awake in the middle of the night by those inner grumbling and discontent, as that nolonger interim solution towers over me like an eternal curse.

I am stuck with it, possibly forever. And I am so fed up with it.