aaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

I am dying at my job lately. IT IS MAKING ME FEEL CRAZY BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW WHO TO TALK TO ABOUT IT and none of my friends here work in anything remotely approaching a technological field so I might as well be complaining in Gciriku.

First off, it’s unusual for me to become frustrated. Because I know I’m an impatient person, I put extra effort into consciously exercising patience. So for the past six months I’ve been repeating this “patience, patience” mantra, while chomping at the bit to revamp my organization’s collaborative and technological systems. Lately I am getting very discouraged and burnt out.

I see the strategic planning process we’re going through [with a contracted Strategy Consultant] as the only chance I’ll have to fix the things I look at every day and see as “broken”. Because what is going to happen is that my ambition will wither, my enthusiasm will dissipate, and I’ll stop caring about helping my organization be the best it can be. (Probably for the sake of my own sanity.)

The worst is probably the website. All I’m doing is advocating for meeting the bare minimum standards, but what I hear is that “we have to maintain our brand”. But what if our brand sucks? If our audience is miserable (site analytics actually show this), then who are we maintaining the “brand” for?

I know that my ideas are well-researched and solidly rooted in best practices… I could probably even publish books on the psychology of interface design, on the importance of meeting accessibility guidelines, and on the practical applications of collaborative technology. There are multiple fields devoted entirely to the practice of providing web users with a good experience, but I think people view it as some vague subjective concept. While I consider the feedback of people from non-tech backgrounds absolutely vital, I am concerned that nobody knows I’m a well-regarded expert. In NYC I was always talking to smart successful tech people, and they would even seek me out to solicit my feedback on their projects! I oversaw the technical systems of 3 different businesses and was the private on-call technician of several public figures. I made no money and was really stressed out, but at least I never wondered if the people I worked with respected me. Then I move back to Maine and I’m just the person who pastes updates onto the website. I love where I work and think the people are great, but I am so underutilized it’s crazy.

On top of feeling like I’m being utterly wasted, change/growth/evolution tend to be regarded as peripheral and unnecessary. Nobody here has any experience in my field; consequently nobody feels comfortable blindly backing my ideas. This might be way off target, and I might just be getting cynical, but I sense that my org will never give me the freedom to enact systemic improvements because that would mean putting their whole operation, en gestalt, under “some kid’s” purview. An increasingly big question in my mind is this: Is my age having a detrimental effect on my ability to get proposals blessed?

Despite this increasing sense of futility, I am going to try really hard to use ’strategic group work’ to gain some allies, and test the waters to see if I can find a better way to communicate all of my organization’s unrealized potential in the realm of internal and external technology applications. But I am NOT a good salesperson, and pitching tech-solution after tech-solution exhausts me. I wish I knew of some ways to manage frustrations and facilitate ideas. Or an effective communication tactic when people are under-informed, complacent, or just dragging their feet.

Oh well. At least I feel better for the moment, having gotten that out of my system. THANKS BLOG