Oddball Update

A lot of stuff is going through my mind right now.

It was a strange day. The weather, ironically, was analogous to my mood: It started off cloudy with a few spurts of rain, then the sun came out. Soon, clouds moved in once again, only to vanish nearly as quickly as they had returned. Then, this evening, it poured rain not once, but twice, with an overcast period in between. Mother nature must have felt like she was being catapulted from one extreme to the other.

That’s about how I felt today, too.

For a start, I don’t think I slept that well last night — it was a slow beginning to the day, and one mostly executed in a haze, as my eyes felt perpetually tired (complete with an annoying muscle spasm in the left lower eyelid, in fact, which probably made me look like one of those twitchy-eyed anime characters). In the early afternoon, before lunch, I had an acupuncture appointment to keep. Fortunately, the weather decided to brighten up just then, and I decided to take the GTO.

After an invigorating drive to the clinic, I received some good news: My blood pressure was back to normal. When I first started acupuncture, the doctor checked my blood pressure and found it a little high. In retrospect, I’m chalking it up to the tremendous stress I had been under for the entire week preceding that check. Things have been going a lot better since this past weekend, and I think I was able to cool off a bit. I even think the tip of my tongue is a little less red than it’s been, although the doctor didn’t seem to agree. (According to Chinese medicine theory, the color of one’s tongue is indicative of the level of “fire” in your heart. If the tip of your tongue is too red, you suffer from too much stress and worry. Mine’s been pretty red lately.)

I felt pretty energized by the time I got home — not sure whether it was the acupuncture, the GTO driving, or both. Apple had made a nice chicken fricassee for lunch, which I enjoyed with a side salad and some black olives. I thought things were going to get better from that point on. Unfortunately, they got worse.

In addition to having continual problems working efficiently, I was treated to some disturbing developments in other aspects of my life which contributed to a general undermining of my Great Faith in the Universe™. I’m not going to detail any of those developments here, but what really kicked me out of my comfort zone was that some of them forced me to take a look at the way I do business, and how the roles I’ve assumed at my place of employment are affecting my overall skill set.

There really is no better way to describe my business acumen than “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” Throughout my career, I’ve always worked for relatively small software shops — with my current place of employment being the smallest one yet. Now don’t get me wrong; I like these close-knit companies where everybody knows each other on not just a professional level, but a fairly casual level as well. When he still lived in the local area, I used to hang out and play video games with my boss (sometimes, at his specific request, in lieu of actually doing any work!). The trade-off comes when you realize that you have to assume so many duties at the company — “wear so many hats” is another way of putting it — that you wind up spreading your skills thin across an increasing number of specialties.

When I first started my career, I was strictly web design only. That was, in fact, the exact title of the position for which I applied in 2000. Over time that position broadened to include advertising and marketing design, application development (including limited programming and software engineering) and customer support. Today, I can also include IT and server management, technical writing and user manual development, email marketing management and ad campaign direction to that list. In a small company, when something needs doing and your already limited resources have all been tasked out with other things, you do the research needed to get the job done. “But that’s not my job” are words that aren’t in your lexicon. If your boss tells you it needs to be done, guess what? It’s your job now! (And if you do good work, it might become your job on a permanent basis — how do you think I ended up with most of these responsibilities?)

On the face of it, I don’t mind any of this. But tonight, some criticism I received forced me to ask the question: Have I become too diluted? Do I now have so many responsibilities that I’m only capable of doing “acceptable” or even “mediocre” work on any one of them individually? I’m not worried about this as it applies to my day job, because my unique assemblage of skills, reliability and quality of work always seem to be just what the doctor (read: my boss) ordered. But I am starting to wonder if I’m fit to be doing design work for hire anymore. With so many hats to wear, my brain is worn out enough as it is by the time the average day ends. And it’s getting to the point where the only kind of clients I can take are others who, like me, are “do it all” types who need me to handle some aspect of their project that they don’t have time for themselves.

It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, I suppose, if I greatly reduced the amount of sidework I take on, or eliminated it altogether (except for maybe that one aforementioned client, who seems to have something for me to do maybe once or twice a year). But it gives me pause when I think to the future, and wonder if I’ll be able to stay on top of any of these various games in which I’m involved. If I had to go cold-turkey and apply for another job somewhere, would I even know what position to apply for?

I suppose the only thing I can do to assuage these fears is bone up on my core skills during the off hours. And naturally, I only have the energy for that kind of extracurricular study when I’m not doing sidework for hire. Over the weekend, in fact, I found myself presented with entire days devoid of any work to do, an event that hadn’t happened in weeks. This left me with enough energy and creative drive to start working on a new web design from scratch, using some visual styles that I’ve been wanting to experiment with. Later this year, I set a self-goal of redesigning my company’s website to help refocus the site on our developer community, and I want to get warmed up. (I even got back to work on the story I’d been neglecting for a few months. It was a good weekend.)

The more I step back and look at this from an outsider’s perspective, in fact, the more I realize that I just need to cut this side business out of my life. It brings me money, but ruins everything else. In the immortal words of the late Russell Hunter (made immortal mostly by the brogue in which he delivered them), “What the hell good is that?”

Funny how blogging about it and getting the words down on paper screen has a way of helping you see things more clearly.

So, assuming I can stay optimistic and on-task creatively, you might soon be seeing some changes around here. I’m looking for a new web host, for a start. I’m also wanting to reorganize the content on this blog — tag all of my old posts, and rework the category structure (because right now, categories and tags seem to be serving the same superfluous purpose). I’ve also got a story to write, a wiki to work on, some musical arrangements to dabble with, and — gasp — perhaps even some drawing to do. Admittedly, I’ve sunk into a bit of a creative “dark age” in the last few years, and it’s a trend that I need to start undoing, primarily by creating an environment that isn’t hostile to the formation of creative energies. I know that sounds like a lot of zen bullshit, but I believe it.

Still, not all of the events about which I am currently apprehensive can be foreseen with such clarity. For them, I must simply cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Topics: sidework, work