Vent!

I'm about a month into the new position. It's been a lot of fun, but I gotta admit it's really pushing me in some areas. I talked a bit before about the payroll and common titles(1): junior @rtist and assistant technic@l director, respectively. It's odd how the bureaucratese/payroll title sounds so much more organic. The common title is more in line with what was advertised and what I was expecting. Damned technocratic, though.

But I guess things never work out quite as expected, and I'm working a lot more these days in the 'junior @rtist' sense of my position, which is to say I'm working on shots. That's awesome, but the pressures remain for the technical stuff, and I feel like I'm dropping the ball on that end because the shot production stuff has been taking precedence, and frankly is a lot more fun.

I'm finding the tech stuff is remarkably like working at a supermarket. I generally know how stuff works, but I don't know where some obscure library or software update or patch is. They've got a nice system for all this, but in the end you still have to know what it's called, what version to get, who can answer questions on it, etc.. Software/command/library names perfectly sensible in some contexts can be impossible to intuit in slightly different ones. We've got a terrific alias for fellow @TDs, but I feel if I send more than about 10 messages to it per day I've begun to overstay my welcome, friendly and helpful as the other teammates continue to be.

An unexpected source of stress lately, though, has been people. Everyone else has been incredibly cool, but I feel like I might have been a little short with folks lately. Part of it is how people calling me or dropping by my desk totally interrupt my already clumsy juggling of different roles and duties. In my old position where stuff had gotten a little too easy, I'd welcome the interruption, but it's been a little aggravating in my current state where I'm still trying to get my bearings. I also think there's some inevitable arrogance that seeps in after any kind of promotion that I really, really should know better than to indulge. A rare luxury about the place I work is that I really do work with some sharp people, but I wonder if some of the things I've said these last weeks might give people the impression that I think otherwise.