day in the life of a website monkey

[rivendellrose]

My job is strange.

This isn't exactly new news to me, but every time I actually think about it I get a little amused. I mean, in a lot of ways, my world probably made a lot more sense when I was stocking and selling textbooks, or before that when my job was to handle all the technology required by professors for their presentations and lectures, and rearrange classroom furniture as necessary. Now, I spend most of every day updating car-dealer websites, which in and of itself isn't all that weird, but the things the dealers want on their sites? Are frequently very weird.

More than that, it's weird to me how much the technology and processes have become old hat to me over the time I've been here. I remember when everything about our ticket system freaked me out, when Photoshop was still strange, and when Flash... was a completely terrifying new beast. I got used to it all gradually, so I didn't really notice the change, but now that we have six completely new people on the team it's been a complete eye-opener. Those things mostly don't scare me anymore. Okay, Flash sometimes does, still, but only when the object is really complex and weird. Otherwise? Meh. Same-old same-old. No problem.

I love that kind of thing, the shift that happens in your mind where all of a sudden you realize "wait, I'm different." I get a little nostalgic about the old days (I kind of miss being the girl who appears and "saves the day" for professors and their lectures, especially), but I like my current job a lot, too. I like my cubicle and my desk with my Dalek, and I like having a specialty (guys, I'm a professional! how scary is that?), and I get a kick out of the fact that my coworkers not only aren't weirded out by my having a Dalek on my desk, but that some of them come up and pick it up and start wiggling the plunger and chanting "Exterminate!" in the required nasal tone. I love working with geeks.

You know what else makes me happy? It's Friday. Anyway, that's my random update for the day, I guess.

Comments

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me on occasion that my entire job is manipulating tertiary phenomenon corresponding to things that really barely exist.

The actual tasks I take on, by and large, consist of sending signals into my computers with the keyboard and mouse, and receiving them via the monitors. The signals themselves are interpreted by a layer of abstraction from the logic computations going on in the processor and memory, which itself is just adapted from the shifts in magnetic field stored on a piece of metal in my computer. (The contents of that piece of metal were transmitted there from another piece of metal off in the source code repository, the contents of which is actually the important part.)

When you think about it that way, it's fairly absurd that I'm being paid a programmer's salary and the only thing I've "gotten done" in the past few years is twiddling some polarities on a ferromagnetic platter I've never even seen. But the polarities represent the source code I'm manipulating - or is it vice-versa?

(And yeah, I get the "wtf, I'm a professional?" sometimes, too. Like my sense of wonder at the world, I'm hoping I never grow out of it - keeps things interesting.)

[shadawyn.livejournal.com]

Yup, what you said. Just switch out "images" for "keywords" ;)