T Minus 25

Only 25 days before I leave Hampshire County Council employ possibly forever. Forever, eternity, no more, never again, the last time. That is unless you believe the K Paxian theory that everything repeats itself exactly as the universe expands and contracts. One of my top 5 quotes from a film is when Kevin Spacey playing Prot says:

"The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, and then it will expand again. It will repeat|this process forever. What you don't know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. What ever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make...you will live through...again and again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around, because this time...is all you have."

Sounds like Hell to those who get things wrong. Oops that's all of us. Perhaps that doesn't fit with quantum theory (which is after all just a theory) but in one sense it fits with what I believe - that we should make the best of the time we have. The bible puts it more brutally:

"Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,..."
Hebrews 9:27 NIV

So my death/end with HCC is fast approaching. T minus 25 and counting. There is a sense of acceleration. I am being asked more and more frantically to deliver a summary of what I do and when I do it. re people really that concerned about my departure? I have a strange feeling that there will not be so much as a bang but more of a whimper as I walk out that door. Truth is I've managed to condense my roles and tasks down to two sides of A4 and that's in a large font size! I bet in 4pt it could fit on the back of a fag packet. Is it first impressions or last impressions that stick with people the most? What will people remember?

Then there's the bit about people starting to virtually draw lots to divide up my possessions. Key item being the large monitor (one of a dual set up) I have had the pleasure of using for the last 6 months. I could have done with it 2 years ago when I first started serious user acceptance testing. If I were to highlight one skill I believe I have discovered and made good use of it is testing software releases. I seem to have a knack in finding bugs or other faults in deployments of Studywiz to the Hampshire Wizkid service. Second to that may be problem solving. Oddly I also enjoy both.

Becoming experienced and perhaps expert in software can be rewarding but it too often just appears geeky to the 'normal' person. Most people just want the software to speed up the task and not get in the way of getting the job done. What is the biggest waste of time I see day after day? People getting bogged down in formatting documents either to fit a corporate standard, number sections and lists as they require or print in a sensible way to fit a human readable piece of A4 paper. I can see why newspaper organisations have a workflow that separates producing copy from editing and that from markup. They can't afford the time for prose creators fiddling about with making lists work. If project managers just learned to create the copy first and markup afterwards, or pass copy on to expert 'markuperers' I'm sure time therefore money could be saved. Templates are fine and should help but badly created complex templates, which no-one understands, in complex applications like Word 2003 used by people who really don't understand styles and lists anyway, are a nightmare, just waiting to waste your time. The latest incarnations of Mickeysoft Office are much better in that respect. They don't expect the user to understand so much and they have surfaced the things most of us want to do. But HCC IT staff are still using MS Office 2003.

Perhaps I will be remembered/missed because I'm not there in the office to help solve those niggly word, Excel or Access issues. Maybe I'd be better on a Service Desk? .... Naw... I'd end screaming at people suggesting they consider changing their job. Ask my long suffering wife. All she wants is for me to quickly solve the problem and get her back on track. Instead I want to teach her how to cope with the issue next time. That's why I think I will always see myself as a teacher at heart. I don't want to solve people's problems I want to help them be able to solve their own. Kathy's not interested enough in learning IT. And I can't blame her. Applications are not designed around people like Kathy, they are still suffering from being originally designed around IT people. Software that goes against that and tries to 'just work' isn't accepted by by the office or IT people. Take OneNote or the primary education equivalent suite by SoftEase. TextEase was (is?) brilliant. An object orientated application that broke the rules ... just like me.

That does tend to be my problem. I am often a bit of a square peg in a round hole and rather than accept having my corners knocked off and be reformed into the round peg, I bash away at the hole trying to make it square. Oh I did try to become more rounded, went on ITIL foundation and practitioner courses, flirted with the idea of doing project managers course. But it's not me. Clearly they are needed the way things are, but there is also another way.

Anyway lets hope I get the ending right.... this time.