Beat down

I am exhausted. To use some newly acquired German, ich bin fix und fertig. The past few weeks of work have been unrelenting. There are plenty of occasions throughout the year where things are at a fever pitch at the office, but these past weeks have been particularly frustrating and somewhat depressing. While pinned down on a long-term project, I’ve been watching as new work keeps arriving in the queue—all of it showing the telltale signs we’ve discussed previously as serious problems to avoid. Hard lessons have been learned. Or, apparently not.

I love where I work. I love the people with whom I work. But damn if they are unable to say no to money when someone waves a wad of cash about. I get it. But money isn’t free, and it’s crucial to understand the implications of what is being asked in exchange for that cash before agreeing to to take it. Does it really make sense to spend hundreds of hours on something that is little more than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, merely because you think it should fit? I know. It would be great if it did. But it doesn’t. And we know that. Or we should know that from experience. But we don’t.

We are literally doing the same things over and hoping to get different results. Or folks agree to things without understanding the scope of their implications. Little balm is it to hear “I didn’t realize this at the start.” Really? I am fairly certain a few voices chimed up to point out what, specifically, was at stake. You just couldn’t or didn’t want to hear it.

But more than all that, it sometimes feels as if the work is futile. That all this effort is little more than rolling a rock up a hill only to watch it roll right back down. Despite the best efforts of our group and groups like us, the landscape of digital publishing is little changed from a decade ago. People assume digital means easy or that if you can post on a blog and use WordPress you are capable of far, far more complicated work. People get blinded by the technical wizardy—ooohhhhh a story map—and utterly forget anything about composing a well-structured, coherent argument. Oh, I forgot, they just slapped that all in a table. Forgive me.

I know I’m feeling all of this more keenly and not as accurately as I should. That my long-term project has frayed my nerves a bit. But I’m not all wrong. And it’s no less frustrating for it.