Enjoying Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot this last week, the song & video "Small Data" (2014), celebrating a way of being - associated (in my head, anyway) with the endorphin high that comes with pulling disparate pieces together. Feeling my people.
This, following a typical work nightmare. Software upgrade turned into a server upgrade, and into full db install. Every step of the way a fuckup, stopping short. Agonizing. Each stopping-short like being completely lost in the woods, finding the path, losing it again. And then, suddenly, out, and in the light, and back home, as if none of it ever happened. Some inconvenience to the end user, but, for the most part, no one ever knowing the sweated bullets, the sitting at my desk until midnight, frantically Googling, trying this, trying that. Such is the IT career path.
That feeling of emerging-into-the-light accompanied by an (unusual, for this workplace) feeling of achievement, and the accomplishment a reward of the struggle. Protestant work ethic, am I right?
The video bringing me back to the mid-nineties in Boston, working for innovative tech firms that were changing the world, before each business venture became an exercise in cost savings, in which successful products are bought out by mega corps who gut the support and squeeze the life from the application.
But, still, I realize that the process of solving the problem is something I can do and something I can be good at, and that's a nice touching-base to ... well ... my base.
The optimism installed (everything in this comic directly from the lyrics) speedily mitigated by the next standstill encountered on that project, the forward-motion always hampered by my own ignorance. Every day a painful lesson in humility.
In all, a brief foray into feeling good about myself, quickly supplanted by the normalcy of distorted, narcissistic self-criticism.
Enjoying Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot this last week, the song & video "Small Data" (2014), celebrating a way of being - associated (in my head, anyway) with the endorphin high that comes with pulling disparate pieces together. Feeling my people.
ReplyDeleteThis, following a typical work nightmare. Software upgrade turned into a server upgrade, and into full db install. Every step of the way a fuckup, stopping short. Agonizing. Each stopping-short like being completely lost in the woods, finding the path, losing it again. And then, suddenly, out, and in the light, and back home, as if none of it ever happened. Some inconvenience to the end user, but, for the most part, no one ever knowing the sweated bullets, the sitting at my desk until midnight, frantically Googling, trying this, trying that. Such is the IT career path.
That feeling of emerging-into-the-light accompanied by an (unusual, for this workplace) feeling of achievement, and the accomplishment a reward of the struggle. Protestant work ethic, am I right?
The video bringing me back to the mid-nineties in Boston, working for innovative tech firms that were changing the world, before each business venture became an exercise in cost savings, in which successful products are bought out by mega corps who gut the support and squeeze the life from the application.
But, still, I realize that the process of solving the problem is something I can do and something I can be good at, and that's a nice touching-base to ... well ... my base.
The optimism installed (everything in this comic directly from the lyrics) speedily mitigated by the next standstill encountered on that project, the forward-motion always hampered by my own ignorance. Every day a painful lesson in humility.
In all, a brief foray into feeling good about myself, quickly supplanted by the normalcy of distorted, narcissistic self-criticism.