It’s been a while since I posted.
I have been busy at work. No, really.
Really Busy.
I started a new job at the beginning of the year, and I feel like I am barely treading water.
Each day brings a new flurry of reading and studying. Everything from new mathematical papers detailing graph theory, to database performance tuning, to new programming interfaces, and technologies.
Each one is additional to the duties that I need to perform to be given a paycheck, and each one is well outside my usual knowledge base.
So, in order to understand a performance report for a database, first I have to learn more about tablespaces, and how indexes are organized.
In order to read papers on graph theory, I have to remember ten years back to the last time I heard the term eigenvector.
It’s frustrating, and awesome at the same time.
Along those same lines, I was surprised by something that I heard today. Another new member to the team was lamenting that in one of her old jobs, everything was standardized. One type of operating system, one directory structure, one database. Everything was the same for each account that they supported.
Everything was easy to support, and she asked me if I wished this job was similar.
I won’t deny that I wish that my days were easier. It would be great if I could reduce the number of times in a day that I banged my head against a keyboard because I added another topic for my reading list. But I don’t understand what happened to our country’s culture of excellence.
Wasn’t there a time not too long ago, where society in general strived hard to acheive, and work beyond what was expected of them?
I have this fantasy vision of the hallowed halls of learning where electric engineers
worked out how to harness electrons for computing. Groups of hobbyists creating, actually
creating computers after their day was over at the office. There is also this faint feeling that in the past, there was a greater feeling of responsibility towards your job, and your company.
The companies have ruined employee responsibility by stealing our pensions, and our stability out of short term greed. In addition there are commercials on television showing us what some kid in Finland will be doing with his strong skills in math and science and telling us how far behind the rest of the world our education system performs. Certainly doesn’t sound excellent.
I am sure that part of the problem is that the present is only truly perfect in retrospect. Our perceptions and feelings about the past are mainly the results of our own internal propaganda.
Sure, it seems cool to be a gentleman that travels to the office in sharp suits and neat hats to do Meaningful Business in a fifties sort of way, but the reality is that with that perception comes the inability of society to accept women into meaningful roles in the workplace.
Beyond our perception, there is something else that is at work. The mystifying of hard work. I have heard too many times in my relatively short career the phrase “Wow….That really looks professional.”
There should be no surprise. I was actually paid to make this Power Point Presentation. Although I didn’t take a class in presentation technologies, the user interface was rather simple. And if I couldn’t have figured out how to make a presentation, It would have been my job to ask every office zombie in the same zip code for help until I could make it “look professional.”
What should be heard more often is “Wow…This looks amateur, did they actually pay you to do this? I wouldn’t use these slides to torture monkeys.”
Maybe if we could utter that phrase in everybody’s office at least once a week, people will start taking more pride in their work. If not because they actually have pride, but are afraid of ridicule.
One thing is for sure, if everyone at the children’s book publishing office was afraid that someone else might actually read their story about musical vegetables, and give an honest opinion about it, then I wouldn’t have to worry about filtering my childrens’ books for phrases with incorrect rhymes.
“What’s the biggest mistake you ever SAW, trying to rhyme the wrong word with DINOSAUR.”
Not Your Super Hero 