Oddball Update

It’s no secret that I abhor using Flash, Macromedia’s Web authoring system that now belongs to Adobe. This is mostly because I’ve always been particularly incensed by the program’s ridiculous little idiosyncrasies. It would also be valid to say that I’m still harboring a grudge from the days when I painstakingly taught myself to use Flash 4, only to have Macromedia completely change the user interface in Flash 5 so that I couldn’t understand it anymore. (Rather than re-learn everything, I gave up.)

But most of all, I find myself continually impeded from making peace with Flash because I keep getting thrown into Flash-based projects that I have no business working on at my level of experience.

Right now, at work, I’m in Flash Hell. On Monday, I was given a surprise assignment to create a Flash-based application for a client that simulates a map, with labeled waypoints that move around on a time-based interval, in a week’s time. I say “surprise” because, even though I knew the project was coming up, I had previously recommended to management that we not use Flash due to a number of client requirements that it would not meet. I was still waiting for them to address these concerns when, during Monday’s ops meeting, I was just told to build it in Flash anyway. The concerns were never addressed. So apparently, nobody cares what I say. That’s great.

After a few conversations with the project lead, I make it clear that we’re going to have to do things slightly differently, due to the client’s requirements, the time limit, and my very limited experience with Flash. The way we’re building it now, it could just as easily be assembled with HTML and Javascript. “So what benefit is Flash giving us now, exactly?” the guy asked me at length. “None,” I replied matter-of-factly, which was precisely my point two weeks ago when I recommended we not use it in the first place. Duh! But like a good little soldier, I’m building it anyway — I was working on it until 4 a.m. on Monday night, and 2 a.m. last night.

One Flash project wasn’t enough, though, and now that I’m knee-deep in this one — and just as I’m getting the hang of it — my other boss tells me that within the next two weeks he wants me to build Flash-based banner advertising that does a cross-domain server script call to get the user’s IP address, does a reverse lookup on their geographic location and generates a map of their town so they can be all impressed with our leet Interwebbing skillz. There’s just one problem — this type of Flash development is among the most advanced known uses of Flash, which, considering that I’m a novice, makes me want to laugh in his face. I’ve never even done self-contained Flash animations for banner ads, much less used Flash Remoting technology.

We’re having an hour-long meeting tomorrow on the banner stuff, so I’m going to have to resist my urge to be a yes-man and actually tell them that they’re asking me to build a nuclear reactor out of tinker toys. Hey, I’m not saying I won’t do it. I’ll try my level best, but I cannot guarantee success and I most certainly cannot adhere to a two-week timeline what with everything else they’ve got me working on (including a ground-up redesign of our main website). If you want something done right and done fast, doesn’t it stand to reason that the person to whom you give the task is actually capable of doing it? If you want some guy who doesn’t know Japanese to conduct a board meeting in Japan, he has to learn the language first. That shit isn’t happening in two weeks, sorry.

From the way one of my bosses talks, it sounds like he wants to get more into using Flash to actually build our applications, since it’s “the way of the future.” All I can say to that is, with contract Flash developers charging as much as 50% more than non-Flash designers, I’d expect compensation in kind. Seems a small request from a man being asked to relocate to Hell.

Categorized as Life, Rants, Life/Work