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I get to work from home a lot in the course of doing my part-time contract job. This has made me acutely aware of not just the time I put in, but the work that I'm doing, and the presumption of the value that work has for my client.
The vast majority of the work is very straight-forward with clear value and need. But some of it isn't, particularly when it leads to one tangent after another and I've gone from looking at a web server config to chasing log files to noticing the diminishing available disk space to chasing other log files to reading 3 month old administrative e-mail that's never been reviewed for a minor problem that's otherwise no big deal other than the fact that it repeats daily and is filling the previously reviewed log files with a lot of noise signifying not much but is slowing eating away the free disk space.
And the next thing I know, an hour has gone by and all I've been doing is reading stuff. (Feel free to take a moment to breathe deep, and you'll have a taste of what it's like.)
So, you might ask, where's the value? Most of the time this isn't an issue. Stop the recurring problem, delete the mail, and get back to the web config. But sometimes it's not that easy. Sometimes there are endless little twisty-turns that all look alike, dead ends, and worse, things that look like problems but really aren't.
I rationalize a certain amount of this by having good intentions about providing valuable work and fixing the obvious stuff when I find it, even if it turns out not so obvious. Then there's the fact that knowledge is power and power is responsibility and the more I know about the servers I'm working on, the more responsible I can be for them.
And yes, there are times when that sounds hollow to me too. But it's what I got.
The vast majority of the work is very straight-forward with clear value and need. But some of it isn't, particularly when it leads to one tangent after another and I've gone from looking at a web server config to chasing log files to noticing the diminishing available disk space to chasing other log files to reading 3 month old administrative e-mail that's never been reviewed for a minor problem that's otherwise no big deal other than the fact that it repeats daily and is filling the previously reviewed log files with a lot of noise signifying not much but is slowing eating away the free disk space.
And the next thing I know, an hour has gone by and all I've been doing is reading stuff. (Feel free to take a moment to breathe deep, and you'll have a taste of what it's like.)
So, you might ask, where's the value? Most of the time this isn't an issue. Stop the recurring problem, delete the mail, and get back to the web config. But sometimes it's not that easy. Sometimes there are endless little twisty-turns that all look alike, dead ends, and worse, things that look like problems but really aren't.
I rationalize a certain amount of this by having good intentions about providing valuable work and fixing the obvious stuff when I find it, even if it turns out not so obvious. Then there's the fact that knowledge is power and power is responsibility and the more I know about the servers I'm working on, the more responsible I can be for them.
And yes, there are times when that sounds hollow to me too. But it's what I got.
