Micro-managing

Why does micro-managing have such a huge effect on me? Why does it make me want to scream and swear and punch in the face of the offender? There must be those in the world that tolerate it better than I do or we will be knee-deep in blood. Why does it affect me so badly?

I reckon that it is because I love to learn. I do. I love to think and consider and work things out on my own. I don't like watching other people solve puzzles- either I am frustrated by their slowness or annoyed that I am robbed of the chance of figuring it out as they blast through leaving me lost in their wake.

Micro-managers rob me of any chance to learn. There is no opportunity for thought, you are just reacting to demands like a dog.

There must be those in the world that take instruction gladly but I take inspiration and mentorship gladly and despise all else.

I need to get a new job before I kill someone.

Pinot 677 clone

My efforts to set aside time to be "creative" were immediately... due to a very large glass of pinot noir.

Ah well. Better luck tomorrow maybe?

Briefly, said Pinot was a gift from an experimenter from UCLA who took a break from his science to squash grapes. He's someone that impresses me with his attitude towards science and scientists and the fact that he actually gave me not one but four bottles of wine, means a lot and I am not sure I earnt it.

Also briefly, the drinking is an attempt to survive the next month or so. I was pretty dry until the past week when I realised that maybe that was in fact the problem. There is, perhaps, a role for alcohol to play in life.

Though I should be careful not to turn into Jules with this.

Creativity

Amy sent me a link today from a website discussing "burn-out". The page advised setting aside some time per day to be creative.

There is little creativity in my job but it exists and part of the problem is identifying it.

Problems require solutions but all too often they just remain frustrations and the solutions are merely resolutions that quieten down the issue until its next incarnation. A real solution requires creativity and once applied, the problem doesn't resurface.

There is someone at work who is fantastic at solving problems. If there is a process that is unwieldy and prone to failure, she can come in with the creative solution.

She helped me out with computing accounts. Such a simple thing but getting users the right computing accounts was a tedious affair a couple of years ago. The existing forms didn't encompass the need to also have VPN (bizarrely this was a separate application process from windows and unix accounts) and access to the controls system (which isn't an account at all but requires a key to be generated and added to permit people to sign in under a group account). And so I struggled to explain to people the various applications and separate routes to getting their computing set up until this super-woman just said "wait- why not just create a new form that includes everything?"

Such a simple thought and yet it didn't occur to me.

This is just an example. In general, she swoops in and cuts away all the confusion and states the obvious and gets the job done.

I want to be her.

Or rather, I want to be able to do what she does and yet perhaps not be her precisely. She's hugely in demand and so busy solving everyone's problems, I don't see that she has time for much else. Maybe I am doing her a disservice and she has a secret Clark Kent life to balance her spandex role but there is a distinct problem to being a problem-solver and that is having to solve problems.

As much as I am trying to take a leaf out of her book, I also want to be creative in other ways. Writing this random blog post is my pathetic attempt at reigniting some love for words, a love that has been somewhat abandoned of late and not exercised as much as it used to be in the days when the Board would have 50 posts in a day and my emails to skit would make Gmail cry out "message clipped" without it being due to indented "reply" text.