Exotic species

I lost about an hour’s worth of potentially productive time this morning while getting some software installed on my computer at work, which simply reminded me once again of the oddities of my current job situation. I feel like a wild animal in a zoo. A nice zoo, don’t get me wrong, as my basic needs are being met and I’m not exactly languishing into oblivion, but it’s still not my natural habitat and everything that I’m accustomed to just having near at hand as a matter of course is now a hard-to-find special order or a jury-rigged close-enough.

I used to work for a company that was expressly founded to create a web application that could be licensed for use by other companies; my job was to be part of the team that would maintain and customize the application. Because that was more or less the crux of the company’s existence (not to mention the fact that it was a relatively small, relatively young start-up) there was a seamless kind of consistency to everything. Of course my computer had all the developer tools I needed, and of course they were compatible with the internet servers where the application resides, because that’s where the corporate focus was, that was the whole point. That company absolutely had its flaws and struggles, but it was a good place for me to really hit my stride as far as doing what I’ve been doing ever since.

But now I’m on a contract working for a defense agency where the emphasis is much more process-based, and these are processes which were old when teh interwebs were young, and depend mainly on human expertise and experience. And it is gradually dawning on those humans heavily invested in the processes that certain kinds of web-based technologies might make their lives easier. Which is where I come in, to translate those gradually dawning ideas into actual web app code.

The major difference, then, is that once upon a time I worked with and for a bunch of people who understood (how well was always debatable, but there was a non-zero amount) web technology and applied that understanding to meeting a need in a certain niche. Whereas now I work with and for a bunch of people who don’t really understand web technology at all, except as users, but recognize it might be applicable to what they do, and who rely on me to fill in the gap in the middle.

Which, you know, that’s the gig and I more or less understood that when I took it. In theory. In practice, there’s a constant struggle to solve things that no one else is even aware of. “Build a website” is a complicated process under the best of circumstances, but to everyone around me now it’s some bizarre electron-alchemy that happens in a cloud of smoke. And as I go through the process and discover I need a tool that hasn’t been provided as a matter of course … if it’s not someone challenging the assumption that I need it at all, it’s someone else informing me that although my previous three projects have been hosted on a server with 2005 version software, my new project has been capriciously assigned to a server with 2008 version software, which means my workstation needs an upgrade in order to even be able to talk to the new project environment. Old company, a server upgrade and developer workstation upgrades would have been part of one big well-planned initiative. New gig, the way a server upgrade affects me is less than an afterthought.


But I figure out what I need even if no one else has me on their radar, and I make noises about it until someone eventually responds, and I stand aside when someone from IT makes time to use their admin rights to download and install the new tools, and the world keeps spinning merrily along. Honestly I will probably find it very unsettling when (if ever) I run out of stuff to complain about at work.