A little retrospective

Sorry I didn’t actually get a daily update out the last couple of days. A new work week brought, well, you know, _work_.

I did have the strangest dream Sunday night, though.

It started off normally enough. I was back in High School. I was taking some test for which I was woefully unprepared, and it was not going well.

You know, one of the ur-anxiety dreams, at least for the sort of people I hang around with.

This one was unusual, though, in that halfway through, I suddenly realized I’d already graduated from college, etc., and there was no reason I should have to take this test, so I got up and I walked out.

Does this mean I’ve finally come to terms with the fact, however wretched my performance in college may have been–and it was fairly wretched–it’s academic, because it no longer matters in my life what my grades were?

Is it a metaphor for my frustration for this DNC gig, which revolves around the fact that I’m being set-up–not intentionally, but set-up nonetheless, to fail?

If you wanted to find one way to structure a job that could drive me nuts beyond all others, it would be this: bring me in as a secondary person on a large, ill-defined project that has years of undocumented history and no process.

By making me secondary, I’m really not in a position to make changes by fiat, I have to ask–but in situations like this, the primary is always so overbooked that answering takes enormous amounts of time, so it happens slowly, if ever.

If the project were well-defined, I could carve out a section and just work on that, and not have to worry too much about stepping on someone else’s toes.

If the history were documented and there was a process, I could at least try and slipstream in and have an expectation of not stepping on anyone’s toes.

But none of this is true, so I’m having a tough time, and it’s not fun.

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Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.