First of all, my single biggest side-project (with the “side” prefix in place mainly because it was not one of my primary job duties, which is to keep a bunch of existing websites running smoothly, but they more or less do that on their own, so anything stands a very good chance of taking of significantly more time and effort) basically bit the dust. The long chain of events leading up to it, in extremely condensed form, went like this: I came on board this contract and met the government boss in charge of the whole office and he said “oh you build database websites? I need one of those” and he gave me this vague vision of what he wanted and it then took forever for me to even get the bare minimum technical support I would need to start working on such a project, during which time that boss left and a new one took his place, and she told me to keep going forward with the project because it was probably a good idea, and when I finally had all the things I needed to make it happen, I got something done and tried to show it to other people to solicit feedback, and the feedback I got – from someone who would ultimately be an end user of the system if it ever got completed – was “Yeeeaaahhhh I don’t really need that, I already have something that does that. What I need is THIS. But don’t do anything else, let me talk to our boss about my recommendations, which actually I want to flesh out a bit more, when I have some free time outside of my other extremely urgent and important duties.” So, dust bitten. And I know a lot of people would be somewhere between morosely bitter and furiously fulminating with rage, but I just laughed.
Because, seriously, I am incapable of taking stuff like this personally. I don’t consider the past few months a waste of time because I got paid for them and I am a contractor and this is what we do: execute on other people’s orders. If those orders end up being carried over from one leadership regime to the next and only far down the line end up getting evaluated by anyone who could actually rightly judge their potential value, at which point they get unceremoniously abandoned? Oh well. Also, your tax dollars at work! Which I know sets some of my friends into paroxysms of indignation as well, but not me.
So we’ll see if that side-project ever gets resurrected. Another comedic element of the whole escapade is that, in the time it has taken for me to even inch along towards the brick wall of uselessness, the software I had to beg and plead for in order to do the work became obsolete, and then I was given new software to upgrade me back to compatibility with the development environment, but that turned out to be an evaluation copy which soon expired, so now I am right back where I started with no working software, current or outmoded, whatsoever, as I wait for the IT department to go about procuring new developer software to match the actual development environment. I know some of the preceding was a bit of jargonish gobbledygook but if you’re at all confused just trust me that this is bureaucratic comedy at its finest.
Meanwhile, the new boss recently decided that there is yet another side-project which I could be working on, this time going through an existing web application which is essentially an online repository of archived documents and “cleaning it up”. (Those quotation marks are distinctly of the Famous Last Words flavor.) There are over a thousand of these electronic documents but some of them probably need to be deleted due to being out-of-date and most of them need to be reclassified. None of which I can do myself, because I lack the subject matter expertise to evaluate what the documents are actually about. All I can do is, once someone else identifies what should go where, is making everything go where it should. My boss understands this but, as it turns out, there is one thing I can do which requires no particular expertise whatsoever: print out all the documents, so that they can be circulated for review by people who should know what to do with them. And, with a surprisingly minimal amount of ruefulness, I accepted that assignment.
I did make sure to ask my boss how many documents she thought could be reviewed in one go, and we agreed that fifty was a nice round number. So since Friday I have printed out forty-some-odd documents and binder clipped them. Some are only a page long, and others over a hundred pages. I am still waiting for one of my colleagues to finalize a review cover sheet which will be used to track the keep-or-delete-or-reclassify instructions for each document. When that sheet is done I will clip one to each document packet and drop off the first fifty with my boss. I will also get started on printing out the next fifty, and then we’ll see if the first fifty ever find their way back to me. I think the odds are fair, but I also think they will degrade with each successive batch. There is no way we will ever get through every single document, because even racing through fifty documents a week, that would take about six months. So is the entire assignment an exercise in futility? Probably, but again, I’m a contractor and that’s the way it goes. I may be eating these words come March, and if so, I’ll own up to it. For now, at least I technically have something to do, and I'm not going to be the first one to give up
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