…they’ll only slow ya down!

Okay, I just wanted to start tonight’s update with an inside joke. Can you blame me? Actually, perhaps you can; however, I don’t care. Smoke a key of that, Crockett.

Had some major hair-tearing this morning. My day got started with another one of those phone meetings where my bosses and I review the work I’ve done on the website and brainstorm content for any sections I’m having trouble writing copy for. The meeting started with a fifteen-minute discussion between my two superiors about some technical software matter that doesn’t concern me. We then started talking about content for four pages in particular that I was needing some guidance on. As so often happens, though, my bosses got caught up with some evolving ideas they had for the section in general, deciding to reverse the order of two of the pages and totally repurpose the central message of one of them.

This frustrates me, because while it gives me ideas about what to write, it means that before I can write it, I have to spend several hours redoing earlier work which we had all considered finished. Namely, I have to modify the Flash applet which I painstakingly built, by deleting tweens, rearranging frames and reordering layers. Then I have to update the links to those pages, wherever they appear, so they are listed in the correct order. Then I also have to audit all of the content that links to those particular pages, so I make sure the lead-in text conforms to the new purpose of the pages. What frustrates me most of all, though, is that the purpose of these pages — which got changed — isn’t something I arbitrarily decided, it’s something we all arrived at together during an earlier brainstorming session.

A lot of this stuff is semantics, and I guess that’s what gets me. We’ve got an absolute, proof-positive, metric fuckton of work to do on this site. Despite being continually asked for an E.T.A. of getting it all done — which I can barely begin to provide, given the constant fluctuating state of the direction I’ve been getting — my superiors keep rehashing the ideas they already gave me, some of which provide the backbone or foundation of our page layouts or navigation structure. Sometimes I think that whenever I get these guys on the phone, they take it as an excuse to create problems or deficiencies where none necessarily exist. We need to get this site launched, whether we do it in pieces or all at once, and then continue evolving it afterwards. If we wait till its perfect, it’ll never get launched. Because it’s never perfect. We’re always learning new stuff, and new ways to present it. At some point we’ve got to get satisfied with what we have, even knowing and acknowledging that it’s going to change again and again, and put it out there. Just…fucking put it OUT THERE, already. God.

This whole mess has been dragging on much longer than even my wildest original estimates. Compounding the situation is the fact that we’re supposed to go on vacation next Wednesday, so if I’m even allowed to do that I’m going to have to have the whole project still hanging around my neck like an albatross, when I had hoped to have completed it. Then we also have to go to a couple more two-hour design appointments for our new house this week, each one at noon. I suppose I might be better served by staying up working until 2 a.m. on the nights prior and then getting up at 10:30 or something, since I’m not going to get much done before we have to leave for those appointments anyway. Oh, Christ…that means tonight, since we’ve got one of those appointments tomorrow. Can somebody please kill me?

I’ve got to go take out the garbage now. I’d like to include myself in it, if Waste Management wouldn’t mind.