Prosaic Paradise

I was faced once again last week with trying to explain to someone what it is I do all day at my job. I mean, I can explain it in real terms with details and what-not. But usually people start looking for an excuse to escape within 3 seconds if I do that. Or I can just mention my title, and let people sort of puzzle about that. (It’s “Systems Analyst”.) I wish that made me seem like some kind of woman of mystery, but really it just makes me seem like another nameless cube drone.

Instead I was forming an analogy, a more fun way to visualize what it is I do, tell me if this makes any sense:

Imagine a large gymnasium. At the far end are 120 buckets. The are “their” buckets. Here at the near end are 95 buckets, full of various items. There are “our” buckets. Some have one item, some have a couple of items. In between stands a really smart engineer who has to build a robot that puts all the items from my buckets into their buckets.

Standing near their buckets is a “referee” who is holding a 300 page rule manual for how things should go in their buckets. My job is to read that manual and write directions for the engineer to build the robot that picks up the items and puts them in the proper destination bucket.

Naturally, these buckets aren’t alike. Sometimes the thing in bucket 5 on this end goes in bucket 5 on that end. Sometimes the 3 objects in bucket 85 on this end go in buckets 4, 67, and 113 on their end. Sometimes there are rules that say that if we put something in bucket 24, we also must put things in buckets 110, 111, and 117. We might not have things that go in those buckets and we have to make shit up. Sometimes the items have to be flipped over before going in the other bucket, because there is a precise way it must be oriented. Or the robot has a bucket of paint and it has to paint the things a different color on the way.

This doesn’t seem too bad, really, except that every once in a while, a messenger runs in and hands the referee an updated version of the manual. Or, and this has been particularly painful for me, the manual lies. We go through the long and expensive project to build the robot, and the engineer has moved on to build another robot in another gymnasium, and the referee comes over and says “You were supposed to fill bucket 74. Please fix that.” “But it says we only have to fill that bucket on Tuesdays” “I don’t care, fill it every time.”

And so I call the busy engineer to come back, remove the “Tuesday Only” arm of the robot, and replace it with an “every day” arm. We put all the things in our buckets and try it again and I hold my breath and hope the referee doesn’t call another penalty on me.

Oh, and by the way, the stuff that is in the buckets is essentially people’s money. So, no pressure.

For a long time my boss was trying to get me into a professional class called “Getting Requirements Right”. They kept canceling the class due to lack of signup. Many jokes were made about how until they could hold that class, we would just have to keep getting our requirements wrong. We began to wonder why no one else wanted to get requirements right.

We have now been to the class! But I suspect we will still get them wrong sometimes. Plus – I know plenty of software developers who have to make their own shit up as they go along, since their company is too cheap to get someone to write requirements. So it’s not so bad. (And I don’t have to write code, which I can’t do and perhaps loathe.) It’s just sort of mentally taxing in a way that’s hard to explain to people. Until now, perhaps.

Tags: work

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