13 Aug 4705 - Yours, Mine, and Hours


Specifically, hours spent in the lab staring at computer screens. I'm sure this is in general not good for me, although I am less worried than I would have been years ago when cathode ray tubes were still popular enough for labs to have nothing else. The liquid crystals can only project but so much harmful radiation.
I had always thought of the projects I do at my job as fulfilling. An excellent application of my expertise.

I am an engineer. You approach me with some problem, and I design and build a device or other thing that solves the problem. You approach me with some need. I fulfill that need. You approach me in the abstract, and I give you the specific and real.
I have no problem at all applying my engineering background to non-mechanical projects. It is, I savvy, a hallmark of my creative spirit that I see no contradiction in an engineer working at a graphic design studio, or a butcher shop, or a digital learning laboratory. I take the abstract to the specific.

And my job is benign among the world of horrible office jobs that awaits my age group. I am almost always allowed free reign of my projects. Allowed in some cases to investigate and present why I think a project would be a bad idea in the first place, or to suggest likely projects of my own. Almost. Always.

Today I was given a project that amounted to much the same. Kaz, here is an abstract goal in mind. Make up some creative solution to it. Cool.
I learned more about the project.
And the objective changed to: learn how to use this software and then use it to make the solution.
Then I learned a little more.
And the objective changed to: here, we have this slide show full of text content that satisfies the goal, and we need images to go with each one, take a portion of the slides and go to town filling the holes.
And thanks to the specificity, this was much less daunting and much more exciting. I was eager to show people how an abstract fit is still a good fit. Rather than literally showing the process of screen capturing, for instance, I could show the result of a screen capture, or a man with a giant bug net, or a reporter interviewing a white duck by a lakeside.
Then I learned a little more.
And then I found that I was restricted to a certain array of images. Thirty-one holes to fill with thirty-five pictures of people staring at computer screens.
If I wasn't sick of that kind of picture already, I would certainly be done with it by now.

Nevermind that all the things are at batman angles. Nevermind that evoking the idea of a person staring at a computer screen to a person staring at a computer screen is a fundamentally flawed idea. Nevermind that I have room to work, having more images than holes to fill.
I was disgusted and provoked. Maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was.

I can see how my bosses who handed me this project could see it as an easy job or a good fit. From their perspective, they've given me a simple task in one hand and the tools to get it done in the other. From my perspective, they had insulted my creativity and intelligence, and expected me to be entirely complicit and robotic about getting the task done. After all, the three of them had been staring down this thirty-plus-page slide show for the last four months trying to make sure it was on topic and relevant and useful. So if at this point any of them was so willing to be done with it that they didn't consider my position in completing the project at all, I would be satisfied. Not pleased. But satisfied with the explanation. Slides are hard to look at over and over again, being designed to be looked at only for a moment, and then absorbed.
Hell I almost want to wash my hands of this right now, but for the fact that after being handed this project I actually care about how it looks.

And I do care too much. It's just a silly slide show made in an excellent program. It may or may not have my name or the name of my lab anywhere thereon. My work on it will almost surely go unseen. And even if it were horrible and a critic of my work were looking at it to figure out whether or not I was worthy of an excellent position doing similar work, I would have other things to show and demonstrate that this one was the exception and not the rule. This is only tangentially about my pride in my work. Or my integrity, or my courage, or whatever.

This is about an attack on joy itself.

If you had but one joy left in all the world, you would defend it from everything. You would be paranoid about attacks on it. Worried that it would go away, or die, or vanish, or be stolen.
And you would fight. You would fight anyone at all with everything you have.

I may have been shattered two years ago. I may have felt like I had no joy left in me.
I learned a little more, but I had that taste. Just a wee dram. A touch.

And from what I remember, I'm not willing to wait until I have only one joy left to defend it.

Back to News