I’m so torn. As I sit here, I’m pulled between five different routes I could take to spend the next three hours until bedtime. Let’s go over them, shall we?
The first is apparently the one that’s winning at this exact instant. For some reason, I feel compelled to write things. Not great works of art necessarily and not long winding diatribes about this, that or the other thing. Just to write. There are words which, finding no outlet into the ears of real humans, must find their way out into the blogosphere in a more textual form. Many times they amount to inane babbling but nonetheless they must make their way to someone… somewhere. So here they are.
Number two has been a real perpetual loser as of late. Yes, it’s that massive queue of literary classics waiting on my shelf to be read. Considering that I quickly lose the contents of most of these mighty tomes a month after I’ve read them I sometimes wonder why exactly it is that I bother.
The third… well, the third has been nagging at me for a while. I have 20 pounds of miscellaneous, unsorted foreign coinage from around the planet that is simply begging to be put to rights somehow. For some reason though, on a night like tonight I can’t find it in myself to break out the Mylar flips and stapler to make any progress whatsoever. In fact, most nights I can’t explain why I have 20 pounds of foreign coins in the first place.
And number four… oh, ho, the mighty number four! This nasty little beast harkens back to that very first day in the local antique (read that: junk) shop back in my home town of Frankfort, Indiana. There I was, a wee lad of only 13 or so and what should I come across? Why the holy grail of geekdom! Yes, you guessed it, a Latin Textbook! My GOD how that dusty lore calls to me. Ah, the time I spent as a child with many an agricolae… sadly, I never actually stuck with it long enough to become truly proficient but even today, that little voice calls to me to take up some jargon of a far off land. Any rate, task four is not exactly Latin but brushing up on the old college Spanish seems a good place to start.
But lastly there’s that pernicious slayer of free time, number five. Most of us have a number five of some sort or another. I’m a computer programmer by trade so my number five is the evil inclination to open my computer and start doing some form of actual work. It’s particularly insidious because I can do it at any time of day or night and I don’t need input from anyone for the most part. I could work for 16 hours a day, talk to nobody and completely blow my entire life away if I wanted to. I suspect my co-workers and management would be overjoyed at such a prospect; think of all the extra work and productivity! At this point though, I don’t see how people maintain the level of interest required to work such long hours. My boss works from 9am through to 1 and 2am the next morning with breaks for meals and I honestly don’t see what keeps him that motivated. On one hand I feel like a slacker but on the other I sometimes think I’ll be the only sane person left in the office this time next year.
On an only slightly tangential topic, I completely don’t understand computer people. It seems in many cases that they enjoy computing simply for its own sake but without any greater purpose for their work. For example, I was talking to my boss’s boss the other day, the VP of somethingorother, and he asked the standard “What are your goals?” question and I said simply that my real goal in the department was to streamline processes and improve procedures to make the department more profitable (no, this is not a boilerplate bullshit answer, I really think this way). He seemed confused by my response; apparently the typical programmer answer is “I want to learn such-and-such language or whiz-bang new technology.” It’s probably a good thing I’m not in management as my response to such an answer would be a resounding and confused: “Why?” Let’s face it, anybody can program. You can teach a monkey the .NET framework in about three weeks if you have enough bananas on hand to keep him interested. Putting code together is officially not a challenge, at least not on the level required by the average software company. So what kind of a goal is it to learn yet more ways of doing the exact same thing but in a slightly different way?
Anyway, enough number one. It’s officially time to four but not until I check in on five.
2 comments:
Rob, as always, quite an entertaining read.
I’ve been struggling with these exact problems. In fact, I’m sitting here right now struggling because I need to do some actual work for the office, but I just can’t bring myself to surf over to thawte and buy the new Web certs we need and punch the appropriate holes in the firewall...etc, etc, etc.
I have been working those hours that you say you could work if you had to. You’ve inspired me to write a bit over on my blog. If you get a minute, you might check it out.
Anyway, thanks for the provacative thoughts Rob. I know that it’s tough to write in an apparent vacuum, but just because you don’t always see the response doesn’t mean it’s not there - you’re blog brings more discussion and more thought than you could possibly imagine!
Man... too much freedome... that´s gotta suck. That´s why I´ve chosen a theme. This year Spanish, next year perhaps Literature or Esperanto or whatever. It eliminates those choices. So sitting in the dr´s office... read something in Spanish. Kids gone... read something in Spanish. Driving to work... listen to something in Spanish. See how easythat is...!
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