Down the Rabbit Hole
The clock is ticking towards 10pm as I begin writing this, and it’s really the first chance I have had all day to empty my head. If I was going to be lazy I would write about how tired I am – weary really – and how the day has knocked the stuffing out of me. That wouldn’t be the whole story though – I got a huge amount of complicated work done. Here’s the problem though – if I even begin to tell you what I’ve been working on, your eyes will glaze over, and you’ll start wondering what’s on Netflix.
Of course I can’t really tell you what I’ve been working on, because it would cross all kinds of professional boundaries – not to mention privacy, security, and non-disclosure agreements. I suppose I can mention fifty thousand lines of PowerShell scripts, a few thousand lines of JavaScript, fifty-odd workflows, and a couple of hundred digital forms that make up one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on. It has pretty much taken over my life since February, and will continue far into next year.
It’s odd really – doing what I do – because explaining what I do generally requires an explanation of the explanation (if that makes sense at all). Even sitting in meetings with project managers from big organisations, they ask what is possible – and I reply “anything”. When their eyebrows raise, I continue on “you can have anything – it’s just time and money to achieve it”. I then try to talk them out of whatever they are asking for, and talk them into what I would rather give them.
Sometimes you need to give somebody what they asked for, before they realise that the thing you originally wanted them to have would have been a much better idea. Sometimes that story takes months to unfold. Then of course it’s their idea – not your original idea at all – and you smile, and set fire to everything you spent the last few months building.
It doesn’t always happen that way, but it does far more often than you might think.
Anyway. I didn’t set out to rant about nerdy stuff. I was going to write about being tired, wasn’t I. So tired I couldn’t possibly waste several hundred words about work.
I think it’s time I went and switched the kettle on.