We’ll always have the Paris room

In which our Hero is a little more excited about watching someone else screwing than you’d want to hear about

Just want to say thank you, Gentle Reader, for the notes on the last BWE (Boring Work) Entry, suggesting that my work entries aren’t boring. And in honesty, if I thought they were altogether irredeemable, I wouldn’t really tell those stories, so I guess that’s a little faux modesty. But some folks are interested in that stuff, and some are not, and I know the character of those entries can be very different from a personal story, so I just flag them.

I would not be offended to learn that you skip them, Gentle Reader. I still struggle with just explaining what I do beyond trivial and facile descriptions that are true but oversimplified. And when I get past the basics of just describing my job, I get to the next problem with is that my work is at least a little bit confidential. Not really secret, but it does not serve for me to identify my project or my client. And then because I’m working in the dark jungles of technology, there’s the fact that my experiences and stories frequently require so much background that it drowns the story.

Science fiction is difficult because it has to explain the world while telling the story, and it frequently fails because the explanation is either insufficient or else overwhelming. I feel like I’m trapped in the same boat, despite this being my reality. I guess the obvious problem about telling stories involving business computers is that some of my major characters really don’t bring any humanity to the story.

It’s good for me to try to tell these stories because it’s my record, and it’s practice in distilling the verbosity into an actual story, but I sometimes feel like I fail. And I certainly regularly fail to reach a point of actual satisfaction with how I’ve spun the story because it takes a thousand words of preamble to get to the punchline.

It’d be so much easier if I was in retail. Everybody has at least a basic concept of retail. Everybody has an idea of a doctor’s office. Everybody has an idea of a mechanic. Maybe I need to write a show where the consultant is the good guy. Then you’d all see.

I know, instant messaging logs are seldom so entertaining for other people as the primaries think they are, and yet I feel the need to record the following:

[11:15]
Nocturne: imdb is all like ‘please vote for sexiest men’
Nocturne: and im all like ‘noooo leave me alone’
Serin: Or pick me!
Nocturne: and its all like ‘ryan gosling’
Nocturne: and i’m all like ‘nooooo’
Nocturne: and it’s all like ryan reynolds
Nocturne: and i’m all like ‘ok’

Suddenly I’m tempted to do a podcast episode just to record that because it cracks me up when I do the voices in my head.

(And this distracts me from the fact that she completely ignored my suggestion.)

The flip-side of “the boring work entry” is that I find it very interesting to get glimpses of competent people doing their thing. It doesn’t really matter what field it is, a professional in action is compelling and interesting, be it the goalie or the gastroenterologist. Sometimes, it’s just that they’re good at what they do and so it’s almost balletic how they move, and act, and think. Sometimes, it’s how they do something that I also do, but differently, tailored to their actions, and frequently something that makes life easier even if you don’t know why yet.

That last point is of particular importance. I’ve been taking things apart since I was very young, and now that I’m older and more prone to putting them back together afterward, I have always wrestled with how to organize the dismantling to make reassembly end with fewer parts left over.

The system I’ve been using for smaller devices has been to kind of “explode” the screws, so that if I take it out of the top left corner with the machine facing me, I’d put the screw near that corner on the table. And so on. As a system it works well for small devices, but it fails as the complexity goes up, more types of screws or more rows or layers. (What do you do when you have a second “top-left” screw?)

And the technician disassembling my laptop did something so obviously simple, yet that had never occurred to me before. He took out the screws and just arranged them as if they were in an imaginary version of the laptop. Each screw from the right of the first one was put down to the right of that screw on the table. Each screw from below the first one, got put below that first screw on his invisible grid. And if he had layers, he just started a second grid.

It’s so ridiculously simple, it almost hurts me that I didn’t see it. But it’s also in someways the reward for watching professionals be professional.

Makes me think about some of the things I do, and if anybody can learn from it at all. The handful of things that make this or that easier. The rules of thumb that you’ve grown for yourself over the years of being you.

[12:11]
Nocturne: oh man
Nocturne: i love cheese