It’s been, I realize, an alarmingly long time since I was actually proud of anything I’d done at work. I haven’t been ashamed of the work I’ve been doing since I started my current job, by any means; I’ve worked hard at everything that’s come my way, and more gratifyingly, I’ve thought hard about all of it—and enjoyed doing so. And believe me, I know full well what a blessing it is to get to feel that way. But I haven’t had all that much opportunity yet to do the best that I think I’m capable of, particularly in my narrow little area of specialization in my still relatively obscure field. A couple of weeks ago, though, I picked up a project that I could really get my teeth into. It occupied my thoughts even when I was nowhere near the office, but not in a bad way: it was a good challenge, and one that I was more than a little nervous about my ability to meet. It’s a project that I was sharing with a more experienced co-worker, but he’s got so much on his plate that he had to limit the amount of time he could put into this one, and he ended up being a project manager more than an IA on it. I like him and respect him, and there was some added pressure because this was our first time collaborating, and I didn’t want him to think I was a complete idiot.
The first full week was spent just understanding the site, the product, and especially, why the navigation wasn’t working as well as it could. Navigation is my thing, after all, and as I declared aloud to no one in particular during a particularly frustrating hour of working with this one, bad navigation makes my teeth hurt. It’s kind of a complex product, at least for me, because my small area of geek knowledge doesn’t encompass this particular type of product, so it really did take a while for me to get my head around it. But gradually, with much effort and occasional insights at odd times (in the shower, among other places), a concept began to come together.
I started sketching it out this week, did a lot of trying out ideas and discarding them, and wasn’t feeling particularly frustrated—even though the project was due today—until I woke up on Tuesday with the flu and a complete inability to think. I thought I would actually have a productive day that day, because I was going to work at home, where I sometimes get more done…but instead, I spent almost the entire day asleep. (I e-mailed the relevant folks at work at 7:45 a.m. to tell them I was going to go back to sleep for a little while and then work at home, and “a little while” turned out to be five hours; I woke up six minutes before the scheduled conference call with the client, which fortunately was exactly enough time for me to force myself into a simulated state of coherence.) Wednesday was pretty productive, good progress was made, and I started the final nav structure that afternoon. Worked on it some more on Thursday morning, then had a small “eureka!” moment, where I hit on a structure that was new, logical, and even sort of streamlined. (Streamlined isn’t my strong suit; I strive for concision in navigation, but I’m naturally prolix, and sometimes it trickles into my work in spite of my best efforts.)
Unfortunately, the network at the satellite office where I work is vaguely glitchy. It isn’t always, but we’ll have whole weeks when there will be random network dropouts for about twenty or thirty seconds, and then before we’ve even really noticed, we’ll get one of those annoying “you have been reconnected to [network name here]. Offline files are available for synchronization.” Thursday was one of those days, but the weird thing is that the first dropout didn’t happen until right after I had dutifully saved my most recent, post-eureka-moment file with an updated name so I would know it was the latest version. Then we had the network glitch, and Visio crashed. When I brought it back up, it recovered…the other file, the earlier one with the earlier name, and didn’t show the newly saved file in the recovery pane at all. So I tried to open the file from its folder, and got a “this is either not a Visio file or it’s been corrupted” message. It was almost 4:00 p.m., and I had lost, I think, about four hours worth of work.
In the greater scheme of things, this was utterly trivial. For one thing, although it was kind of tired right then, my brain was still inside my skull, and the prospect of recreating the work was daunting but not actually unimaginable. For another, with all the bad news that’s been battering the world, and especially the Gulf Coast, recently, it’s just really hard to feel too tragic about losing a stupid Visio file. And a co-worker and friend had received some really horrible news that day. So I was able to keep things pretty well in perspective, I’m happy to say. I made some fussy noises and wrote a comical e-mail about it to a couple of co-workers and whimpered softly to the heroic and very sympathetic tech support guy who did his best to help me/gently inform me that I was SOL. Then I stepped away from the project for a while, did some other little administrative-y things that needed to be done, went home, relaxed a while, and reconstructed the work until about 1:00 a.m. I didn’t get that far, but just getting it back on track made me feel better…even though I was convinced that the reconstructed version wouldn’t be nearly as good as the original.
Today, I got all the way back into it, finished reconstructing the nav sketches, and started doing the detail work. It took longer than I’d hoped, but I actually improved it by putting in the extra time. And by 5:00 p.m. almost exactly, I sent it off to my co-worker so he could look it over before sending it off to the client. Then I sat at work for half an hour (he was up at our other office) and waited for him to call me and tell me it was unusable and just how had I managed to get hired for this job, anyway? No such call came, fortunately, but when I checked e-mail at home after dinner, there was his note to the client, praising my work and giving the bulk of the credit to me (unnecessarily, since his contribution was beyond essential). And you know what? I’m not going to take the bulk of the credit, but I think I did pretty damn well. It’s a fairly original approach, it follows sound principles without adhering to them as though they were unbreakable laws, and most important, I think it represents an improvement over the current system. So I’m actually proud of myself.
It’s all proprietary and top secret and so forth, so I can’t even say what the site is, much less post the URL when/if it launches, the way I’d like to, so for all anyone reading this knows, I’m lying and the whole thing sucks. But I don’t think so, for once. I think I did a pretty decent job doing what I love to do, and I really can’t ask for much more than that.