Outrage fatigue

[elfs]

As has been observed a gazillion times, those people who have been blogging for more than a year (or, in my case, fifteen years and 15,900 posts.. zoinks!) make up the small population of people who like to write, many of whom would hate to write if they had to on a schedule or for a living.

I'm just running out of feelings to write on. It's a bit of outrage fatigue, the overwhelming sensation that here we are, three weeks away from knowing if we have to live with George Bush or John Kerry, if we have a Democratic or Republican congress, if we're going to have Supreme Court justice nominations over the next four-years that will favor individual rights or state power. If we're going to spend four more years with Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Perle, and company. If Kerry gives any damn at all about the public domain.

Omaha is so booked in her schedule this week that she and I have had no time to be husband and wife recently; when we're home most of our energy goes into being mommy and daddy to one and sometimes two very busy children. Wonderful kids, but still... *sigh* I was booked last week.

Work is mostly a grind because we're at the end of a bugfix phase, and since I work on a very broad but shallow component, I'm at the mercy of all of the departments that make changes-- "statistics reportage changed the underlying API, so the UI is broken again"; "we added this new feature to the file system, the UI doesn't show it"; "one customer wants to know if we can support NIS and ADS at the same time, so we need a UI component that does that"; and my favorite, from marketing: "The design is solid and easy to navigate, and all of our customers report that it"s very useable, but could you make it look more like iTunes? We really like that burnished steel and curves look down here." To the last, I asked, "So you want me to violate the Corporate Logo and Style Guide we spent buku bucks on?" "No, just change the backgrounds and colors a bit." "That's what the style guide covers!"

Hemmed in, tired, a bit burned out. Trying to get Janae's outline done, in the hopes that I'll be able to write something for NaNoWriMo, if I choose to do it. Still haven't made up my mind. I need to do something else for a while. Not sure what. I might suggest that my packed social schedule the past three weeks is part of it-- too much exposure to other people has drained me.

Comments

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Marketing is the bane of our existence. They write ad copy deliberately vague, so I spend way too much time arguing with customers about what the product can and can't do. And they include features that haven't been signed off on yet, so that when they're not included in the final product, support are the ones who have to tell the customer. It makes me want to hurt them.