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entrusting the further articulation
Tuesday, March 2 1999
At work today, the new guy Marty, the premium Microsoft Windows expert who pretty much runs Web Development these days, took me aside to tell me that he's concluded that I am a "natural programmer," meaning someone who was born to program. He'd been looking at and hearing stories about my robots and has evidently decided that I have an unusual gift. He wants to take me under his wing and develop my skills further. Marty has strong teacherly urges and I suspect that he sees me as some sort of ideal student. It sounded cool to me, but it's also weird given the fact that I've also been called a "natural painter." Can you think of any two disciplines more mutually exclusive? Meanwhile, here I am attempting to write.
There was another classic scene today of marketing people not getting what it is we do in Web Development. I won't go into it any further than to say that for them what I do might as well be magic, and since they don't understand the life I breathe into the web pages that they wanted done yesterday, they tend to forget I even exist. When they do give credit, it's generally to the people whose work they can sort of understand: the graphic designers. The new vice-president of marketing (whose job must be different from the old vice-president of marketing, who, for whatever reason, still has a position called vice-president of marketing) was hurriedly trying to explain his impossible demands before ducking into a meeting. As he departed, he entrusted the further articulation of these demands with a red-haired girl (our new "director of promotions") who was hired only yesterday. She tried to come off as sharp and fully internet-aware while we (Kevin the DBA, Sherms the Graphic Designer and myself) arrived on a compromise solution pretty much around her. I wonder what it's like to be thrust essentially unsolicited into a scene like that. I mean, we were giving her deference only out of respect for her newness on the scene and, dare I say, her gender.
I came home to find Kim had gone on yet another furniture spending spree. It was all fairly practical stuff she'd bought for cheap, but whenever I see evidence of rampant purchasing, I have a tendency look askance.
The fog tonight is thick and clammy and sticks like honey to my clothes. It feels sort of like it might snow, though of course that's an impossibility.
You have to wonder about dogs. Their olfaction is several orders of magnitude more powerful than that of humans. Yet, when they come upon a pile of freshly steaming poop, they stick their nose right up to it and sniff. The fragrance would be enough to knock me out at that range, yet the dog stays there sniffing while I grow impatient on the other end of the leash.
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