Housework

I’m fascinated by the jobs people do. I mean, I know I have friends who are secretaries and teachers – and ministers, of course – but an awful lot of people kind of just “work in an office”. I wonder what their days are like; do they spend their time sending emails or typing documents or just thinking? Do they have a lot of control over what they do, or are they given a list of tasks to carry out today? And on top of all that: are they really good at their jobs, and how could you tell?

I guess I think about this in part because I don’t believe anyone really knows what I do. My title is “software engineer”, which is a euphemism for “programmer”, and I think most people who see that would probably think that I write computer programs all day. Put aside for the moment that I firmly believe that a lot of people (I won’t say “most”) really don’t even have a clue what a program is.

My own family is completely mystified by what I do. My mom used a 3-word title to "label" me in a Christmas letter one year; she got all 3 words wrong. My wife looks over my shoulder once in a while, and is convinced that I basically type random gibberish all day long. Not to mention the periods I spend staring at the screen, not moving at all... I don’t guess that looks much like work either. My daughter has said she wants to grow up and take my place when I retire, but I suspect she mostly wants to sit in a recliner all day in front of a screen while wearing slippers.

I tried to calculate it today, but I think it's quite possible that I spend fewer than 20 hours per week wearing shoes.

The truth is that while I write code now and then, my job description – or at least my job practice – is kind of all over the place. One of my major responsibilities is learning about some of the new software my company produces; at times that means I end up handling questions from colleagues and problems from customers. So quite often my day is spent poking through program code to try to figure out why things are behaving the way they are.

I work from home, also, and in some ways that doesn't work well with my personality. I can be easily distractable -- I like to think of it as multitasking -- and with easy access to a kitchen full of food and an Internet full of... everything but food, let's just say sometimes my concentration level is not a horizontal line. If all else fails, I can always take time out to pet the cat.

(Partially) as a consequence, my workdays lately have felt like episodes of "House"... I seem to stumble around for the first 49 minutes of the program, or even 53, but then right before the last commercial (or in my case, at the Outlook reminder that I have to do the Bus Stop Trip), I finally pinpoint the disease. Sometimes I even have time to start treatment before I go off the air, but a fair amount of the time I end up with a special 2-part episode, continued next time.

However, with "House" about to go off the air, I have to choose a new role model. I'm trying to decide between Martha Stewart, the Amazing Racers and the dudes on Project Runway.