Letting go…

I used to be the house techno-weenie. If it had buttons, batteries,
ran on electricity, had moving parts *at all* I was the go-to girl in
my household.

When I got married, however, this all changed. My spouse became the
go-to guy, much to my annoyance. The complex windings and logic that
had become second nature after 20 years of kludging together legacy
systems, outdated VCR, ancient and cryptic stereo systems, they all
came undone. Dr. Spaus undid them all over time and rewired according
to his own internal logic, his own perception of how data and
electricity flowed.

It pissed me the he** off.

But as I went from a parent with a single squalling mealoaf to the
parent of a wild-thing, an organizer and a one-upper I had less and
less time to devote to my amateur love of gadgets and electronica.
Hooking up the new Xbox? By the time I’d finished working, feeding
the family, doing the laundry and putting everyone to bed, I was
happy to find I could just sit down and play, that Dr. Spaus had come
home and set it all up for me. Heading to my parents for the
Thanksgiving holiday? I was happy to have Dr. Spaus field the
technical questions so I could spend some quality time with my sister.

While it still irks me on occasion, the turning of my friends and
family to someone else for their technical expertise, it’s something
Ive had to let go of. I’m sure, when my oldest son takes up the
mantle of supreme family-geek, Dr. Spaus will have an equally hard
time letting go of that position. I’m sure my father had a hard time
giving it up to me.

Contact with the enemy.

You know that famous saying, “No plan survives contact with the
enemy.”. What happens when you don’t have an enemy, or at least, your
enemy is a faceless string of dates, asset lists and development
schedules…
You’re screwed.
This is one of those industries where we tend to get promoted to our
level of insanity. People, producers find out real quick how creative
you are, how hard you are willing to work, and perhaps most
importantly, how fast you can learn. Hands up everyone who has been
handed a task they had no idea how to accomplish. Mmmmmhmmm.
Thought so.
Now hands up how many of you stepped up to the plate and made it happen.
Mmmmmhmmmm. Almost the exact same number.
That’s how we learn here, how we push forward, we take on something
new, or even something just a little new and we learn, we grow, we
move forward.
And sometimes we find out we really had no idea what we were doing in
the first place. Or, if we did, we find out that the idea we started
with gets rapidly outstripped by reality and despite the sum of our
knowledge, we’re really all just Newbs, just with a few more XP to
spread around.