Biding My Time

Sorry, about the lapse of a few weeks. Let's just chalk it up to life getting a little busier than I would like. In the meantime, I just had to share this great, great news about my job.

I've been complaining for months (some might say years) about my job. This is how I chalk it up: great work environment and great people but the actual content of my job has moved more and more into the technological realm and I've grown less and less interested. And I'm not just talking less interested, but also bored stiff out of my mind. The kind of boredom that makes me daily want to drag my fingernails along a chalkboard and scream with delight at the act--simply because it is something that interests me more than what I'm doing every day.

I've felt like a giant slug too because the things I'm forced to discuss in this technological realm are things like databases, servers or programming languages. Some kind of latent guilt keeps coming up too for me that I should be interested in these things because I was being forced to discuss and think about them and I should be able to procure even a modicum of wonder in them. Nope. Nada. Nothing. I would much rather clean my toenails and tweeze the hair from my legs one follicle at a time then ever discuss these items again. Many, many times in the last few months, I've been in the middle of an important discussion that involves one of these items and I've been struck dumb when this thought clangs with brilliant clarity throughout my brain cavity "I do not want to spend my time discussing this. Ever. Ever Again."

And so has begun the long, slow dance of disentangling myself from this web of responsibility. I work for a very small company or division of a company (about 12 full-time people) and we have been trying (stupidly) to support our own IT team. In other words, we've been trying to output big products and customize our web presence the way a larger company or a better-funded company might do it. All it has done is cause me heartache and pain because I'm over this division. I've said for a long time we are trying to do a job with little or no resources but with all the expectation that accompanies those better resources. And the gap between our delivery and our expected benchmark of achievement has killed me.

But now to the good news! Finally, finally, finally after years of trying to communicate this issue, I think we've broken ground. A few of us as a team, pooled our brain resources and started AGAIN researching one aspect of the problem --a database to handle subscription services. Today we had a presentation by one of the companies we researched and that presentation was a revelation to me. My years of headache and heartache might ACTUALLY HAVE A SOLUTION!!! This sales rep for this company kept talking about their solution and the more he talked the lighter and lighter I felt inside. My stomach unclenched from a three-year long clench and my grin got wider and wider and wider until I felt like a little kid on my first trip to Disneyland. Every option he showed us solved yet another technological problem we are having or we are anticipating in our company. Every new screen he toured for us, offered options and advantages at my fingertips that I would have only DREAMED about before. It is like we have been working in a tiny grass hut with a mud floor and this gentleman came along and offered us a 30,000 square foot mansion that boasts an indoor swimming pool, indoor tennis court, and is move-in ready. We can even, at no extra cost, have a full-time gourmet chef at our disposal. It's like I was given the moon.

I'm so relieved I want to cry and dance and sing all at the same time. I've been trying to talk myself down from cloud nine all day because we only met with this sales rep for an hour and despite what I gathered from our conversation, I still have to ensure that this solution would really, really work the way I think it will. Yet, if it does, if it really delivers what I think is promised inside its lovely, lovely offering, my entire work life will change and that would be an answer to my prayers.

It all comes with giant price tag. Money, money, money, money. So that will be the next hurdle if we finally decide to go this route. But that hurdle seems like the barest ant hill to me after the mountain I've been carrying around. A completely do-able ant hill. And an ant hill I will gladly encounter, if I can only get this crying-singing-dancing under control that keeps bursting out of me.

One way or the other, I'm taking this show on the road.