I miss making things work...
Feb. 25th, 2003 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonToday I'm writing up an overview of some stuff I understand, so I should be much happier than I've been, but I still can't concentrate. Wondered why. Finally I looked in my work journal and realized that I hadn't touched code, thus making anything work, since the 14th, and I didn't do a lot of it that day either. It's becoming clear to me that I'm kind of addicted to this, and that my gut instinct is to put higher priority on that than on stupid political things. Making things work, or even work better, is intrinsically motivating to me. Maybe this makes me one of those technical people who will never rise above some level because they can't stand to not have their hands dirty, but I think the real problem is that all of this company's higher-level goals leave me cold, and so I only find the slightest joy in the low-level ones, the ones the CEO barely notices exist.
In Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card, there's this kid Alvin who is special, and is more or less in direct opposition to The Unmaker, your general malevolent force of evil and chaos (having only read the first book in the series, I don' t know more than that). Sometimes the kid thinks too hard about all this unmaking and kind of blacks out, and when he's come to he's usually made a little basket out of grass--just for the sake of creating something, even a little thing, which flies in the face of unmaking. I feel like that sometimes. I make little software baskets and things-that-work to keep myself feeling alive, and I daydream about what to tell the HR head when I finally quit ("well, no, G, the benefits aren't as good, but they offered me a window and as you know I've been working in a cave for this company since I was 22, that should tell you all you need to know"). Most times this strategy works fine, and my bosses are aware of my preferences, but then they forget and take me off software and useful stuff in favor of filling out forms nobody reads, and I get miserable and/or unable to concentrate within a couple of days.
I learned a new word today, cenotaph. It's a monument for a dead person whose remains are elsewhere. That's another thing I like... learning words.
In Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card, there's this kid Alvin who is special, and is more or less in direct opposition to The Unmaker, your general malevolent force of evil and chaos (having only read the first book in the series, I don' t know more than that). Sometimes the kid thinks too hard about all this unmaking and kind of blacks out, and when he's come to he's usually made a little basket out of grass--just for the sake of creating something, even a little thing, which flies in the face of unmaking. I feel like that sometimes. I make little software baskets and things-that-work to keep myself feeling alive, and I daydream about what to tell the HR head when I finally quit ("well, no, G, the benefits aren't as good, but they offered me a window and as you know I've been working in a cave for this company since I was 22, that should tell you all you need to know"). Most times this strategy works fine, and my bosses are aware of my preferences, but then they forget and take me off software and useful stuff in favor of filling out forms nobody reads, and I get miserable and/or unable to concentrate within a couple of days.
I learned a new word today, cenotaph. It's a monument for a dead person whose remains are elsewhere. That's another thing I like... learning words.
