Flashes of Panic

It’s probably a little over-simplistic to imagine some great accounting of righteousness in our lives that levels the pinball table every time we try to tip it, but it certainly helps sometimes.

I’ve been something of a slacker at work lately. I enjoy what I do, and I love the middle stages of a project where the problems have been identified and I’m finding the tools, fitting them to the task, and really getting into the meat of it. My problem is that I loathe the final stages, the going back and sanding off the rough edges left by the tools, the interminable finding of little details which need fixing. As a company, the reaching for perfection we do in the final stages of a project is what makes us what we are; we do good work, and that’s why we’re successful. As an individual, I get itchy. Discovering that my big batch jobs converting EPS book art into JPEG files missed nearly every table in a twenty-eight-chapter book, for example, makes my skin crawl. Instead of the comfortable big batch job that runs in the background for a few hours, I will have to open each of the files, “fix” them slightly, and send them through the process in runs of one to five at a time. They will have to “catch up.”

Same thing with final checks on CD-ROMs. Inevitably they are hybrid CDs, with marginally different file structures for Macs and Windows systems, and the spell recited to make them come out properly is complex, but we will repeat it four, five, six times, fixing one or two spelling errors or bad links each time. Inevitably we’ll find the one we missed two or three weeks after it has gone for reproduction.

It’s tedious, it’s exacting, it makes me itch to be outside and moving instead of sitting here. But we’ve got two projects in final stages right now, two batches of tetchy little fixes requiring my attention. I feel like a small child resisting vegetables, but I need to do this stuff. First, because not fixing the problems just puts them off, and exposes the errors to customers, which is A Bad Thing. Second, because I’ve done an unacceptable amount of slacking in the past few months, and I should make up for it somewhere—even if I’m the only one who knows about both the slacking and the make-up. Karma, you see. It knows.

Now playing: I Miss You from Post by Bjork