Towards the end of last year, I was on a conference call, discussing a system that I had a hand in building several years back. I hadn't had much interaction with the customers who used it since it went into production. I know it works pretty well, since I hardly ever have to do anything to keep it running. We were getting some other folks up to speed on what the system did. The customer who used the system the most was doing a demo, and I have to admit I wasn't paying that much attention.
That is, until she started saying things like "and this is the part of the program I love" and "[feature] is great, it saves me a lot of work."
My ears perked up at that. Love? I support several different systems at work, some built in-house, some from third parties, and a few that are a mixture. In most cases, the people who use these systems would describe them (on good days, at least) with words like "okay" or "fine." I had never heard anyone use the "L" word to describe a program they used at work!
When I first thought of launching this site, I thought it would be cool to reference one of my favorite Donald Fagen songs. I was fully invested in the cynicism and sarcasm inherent in that song, and that lyric in particular. Maybe my experience isn't universal, but in the IT shops I've been in (and many others that I have heard about), it's easy to get jaded about technology. If you don't snort in derision at the idea of "a just machine to make big decisions," then you must be new here.
So for me, hearing my customer sound so cheerful and positive about what I considered a fairly ho-hum system was a revelation. No, this system didn't "make big decisions." We hadn't built the next Google. But it made her job easier, and that, to me, was something. The experience reminded me of why I got into IT in the first place. A system I helped build not only made the company work more efficiently, it actually made somebody's life - at work, at least - a little bit better. And let's face it, with the amount of time most of us spend at work, making that experience more tolerable is a decent accomplishment, in my book.
So, although I decided to keep the site name (I had already paid for the domain name, after all), I decided to approach what I write about with less jaded cynicism, and with a more positive attitude. Less like The Daily WTF, and more like Hacker News. I'm going to concentrate on making myself better, because that helps me and helps the people I work with. And when it seems like nothing is going right, and the best I can hope for is for things to be a little less worse, I'll try to remember that day that someone told me, albeit indirectly, that what I do matters.
