Light bulb moments

Throughout that seemingly endless period spent applying for every job under the sun (with the notable exception of that dreadful card shop), I made a point of tweaking my CV and its covering letter to suit each application. I do not now recall why it was, when applying for a job updating landfill surveys, that I chose to include the fact that I am fun to work with, but I did.

Some people who choose to be the custodian of a smart little dog will give it a comfy bed, feed and water it, and walk it round the block twice a day so it can sniff the base of the local pillar-box. Others will engage with the dog, teach it little circus tricks and reward it for learning how to perform them. I believe that an engaged little dog will get more out of life. I believe the custodian will as well.

Exactly the same is true of those who choose to be custodians of powerful software. My line manager is rather enjoying having a team of staff to carry out dog-walking duties while he occupies himself devising new little circus tricks to streamline drawing office efficiency. He also seems to enjoy having a similarly-minded staff member who will happily construct the little sequinned dog-outfits and conical hats with pom-poms on to make the performance that bit more attention-grabbing.

And so it was that yesterday morning I was summoned into a huddle round his desk to be shown a delightful new trick which will save the team the thankless task of sending out endless emails to people who aren't engaged enough to read them, notifying them of a re-issue of a standard and regularly updated drawing. But he wasn't happy with his graphic. It was a round red button. It would have looked great with PANIC written on it in yellow, but it wasn't a panic button. Neither was it an emergency power kill-switch, but it looked like one. He needed a graphic appropriate to its purpose. So he asked me to knock something up.

A hyperlink symbol was required and so I drew one, but it didn't result in a happy enough grin, so I drew another, which did.

Today I have been back on my mammoth project; the interactive drawing of all our sites around the country showing which functions are performed at each. My fun-loving manager decided that part of the interactivity should involve “on” lightbulbs in yellow and “off” lightbulbs in grey. He also rather fancied the idea of happy little faces in the yellow lightbulbs and sad little glummy ones in the grey ones.

I have made it and it works (the smileys and glummys are visible only to the drawing team, they are invisible to the printer). Line Manager's body-language is professionally discreet, but when he is happy his face lights up as obviously as a waggy tail.

At close of play today he apologised for having to send me an actual critical task which will take me away from the circus ring for a few hours tomorrow, but bread needs butter. I believe he was genuinely sorry about that.