A mixed bag.

Life has been a curate’s egg, of late (note that if you’ve clicked the link, I actually mean "a mixed bag", rather than "some good parts but ruined as a net effect") – I hesitate to bang on about my broken instrument again, but that was a real kick in the fork… I’ve been so run off my feet that I haven’t managed to blog for a few days, which is annoying in that yet another thing that I’m attempting to do is threatening to fly south for the winter, but as you can see (if you’re reading this), I’ve dragged myself with weary determination to my keyboard. Well… Technically, I dragged my keyboard to myself with weary determination – I’m currently using a laptop (which, amusingly, if you like this kind of thing, is the same word, but pronounced “lappee-toppee” in Brazilian Portuguese).

But I digress.

Naturally, given the clerically ovoid nature of my recent life, there have also been uppers. I have discovered that I can fix the MC-808 for £50, which (all things considered) is rather better than I was expecting. Also trying to focus on the silver linings, my lack of spare moments meant that I blissfully (if a little inconveniently) missed out on the weekly worship at the Temple of Katona, and was forced, instead to pick everything up elsewhere. Maybe it cost more, but at least I didn’t feel dirty.

Furthermore, the law studies proceed apace, and I've even learned a couple of useful little factlets, which I’ll divulge in a future blog post that I'm planning to write on legal issues (nothing heavy, BTW – just some genuinely interesting things that I feel even the non-legally-inclined may ingest with murmurs of “REALLY?” or “Well I never!”).

Additionally, I had a curiously rewarding moment at work. To give some context, when I was first starting out as an IT “professional”, I worked as a programmer, prior to gravitating into support and finally deployment and packaging. It was actually a fairly rewarding aspect of the industry for me, as it was a pretty good combination of problem-solving and creativity. It also turned a previously pretty average smoking habit into a 40-a-day chain smoking Problem (and the capitalised “P” was intentional)! As it turns out, ADD can be useful – at least, my variety; I have a great capacity to “hyper-focus” on one single aspect of certain things, and programming is one of them. Unfortunately, I then lose track of literally everything else – time, hunger, etc. – and if I happen to be a smoker and the packet is on hand, the addiction just kinda drives itself in the background… Glad I quit…

But I digress.

Anywho, my professional life finally “came full circle” this week, when occasion demanded an application (or suite thereof, actually) to perform a bunch of processing on hundreds of computers simultaneously, report back to a central point, and then process the whole. Unfortunately (without boring anyone with the minutiae), such software did not exist. More unfortunately, nobody else in my office knows how to write code, and even more unfortunately, they CERTAINLY weren’t gonna pay the full shebang for a bespoke application, given the relatively low-priority requirement for the end result. So it fell to me.

For the first time in over 14 years, I wrote a set of applications, to integrate with a bunch of Windows scripting and registry commands (that I last used 6-7 years back), based on support knowledge that I built up 2-4 years ago, extracting data from in-house-repackaged software (currently mastering…) and all to be orchestrated by the central deployment server that I seem to be in charge of (what I’ve done for the last year and a bit). Unusually, 5 distinct stages of my career all came together in one blaze of glory (apologies for hideously overstating it, here) and it actually worked! Go figure.

And then I realised that I'm pretty much the only person I know who can do EXACTLY what I did there. It’s a weird feeling when you recognise that moment.

Everyone has vastly diverse sets of skills and occasionally uses several of them at once. Some people, such as neurosurgeons, are among very few (or are sometimes even the only person) who can do the single thing that they do on a daily basis. Equally, the actual end result of this project was not particularly special or exciting. However, being as I am, in a career where lots of people can do what I do in each of my areas of expertise, it’s genuinely unusual to have a moment where I don’t know anyone else who has the precise combination needed to do what was required at the time.

Everyone will naturally have one particular combination of skills that is either rare or unique… And I have no doubt there are others who also have this particular combination, but I don’t know them. Not that this makes me particularly special – just curiously and fortuitously in exactly the right place at the right time to do something that would normally have involved several people. Weird, really. And I’ll probably never need to do that again.

The programming made me a bit nostalgic (still hate computers, though). It also made me tremble uncontrollably and need the little boys’ room repeatedly. It turns out that in the absence of an active smoking habit, lots of coffee performs the same function as lots of cigarettes.