The Project Effect

I used to say the CMS project altered my personality. It was just so mind-numbingly horrible that I had to stop caring about, well, pretty much everything. I can't really explain it, it's just that doing something enormous, time consuming, largely pointless and irreconcilably bad for several months solid meant I had to go a bit "zen" simply to cope with the soul-destroying, monotonous obnoxiousness of my day-to-day work.

Knowing that you were spending hours working on a flawed design which would never be good, could never be good and was doomed to fail spectacularly was depressing. Being able to see the flaws, but being unable to fix them was depressing. Being largely responsible for helping people try to navigate through the flaws in order to create something reasonably useful, even while knowing it could never really work? Well, that was kind of depressing, too.

So, I learnt to let it go. To accept the flaws in everything I was doing. To ride them, like a leaf on the wind. My brain was slowly turning into a glazed donut as a result of the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the tasks, but I learnt to be okay with that, too.

It's taken me a couple of years, but I've slowly managed to get a bit more coherent. At least, I think I have. But, then, I forget what I'm doing as I'm in the middle of doing it, and I just spent the last three minutes hitting myself in the head with a balloon.

Believe it or not, that's some sort of progress. I still have a nasty habit of not caring about things being wrong and horrible, though. I think it annoys the dickens out of the people around me, because they tend to want me to panic along with them (or at least look like I'm taking it seriously), and all I can do is say, "Yup, we're doomed all right. Want a cup of tea?"