Today I got to put on my archaeologist hat! I bet you didn’t know I even *had* an archaeologist hat. I do! And what does an archaeologist hat look like? Well. My fav-o-rite archaeologist hat is a white baseball type of hat with sun wings sewn on to it. By hand with red thread. (If I’m remembering accurately. I’m pretty sure I at least have the sun wings right.)

Actually my archaeologist hat does not resemble the Sun Wings Hat at all. My archaeologist hat is just a regular knit hat with a pair of big caribou antlers attached to it. A double-shovel, I believe they call it. I don’t have to put my archaeologist hat on very often but when I do, look out world!

So today I was trundling along doing my regular job, coding html pages, unsnarling old javascript, and s-l-o-w-l-y writing requirements. Tink tink tink. All the while, in the back of my mind, collecting issues that will have to be discussed and planning for how we will incorporate the next bit of new and different functionality into our product. A low-pressure multi-tasking kind of day working on one prodject while occasionally answering questions about others via email or I/M or simply yelling over the wall.

And then I clicked a link to a page way over in an obscure corner of the “demo”, our product’s very high fidelity prototype and, well hello. What is that? I won’t try to describe what was wrong other than to say there were no borders where I expected to see borders. Don’t ask. You do not want to know. This launched me into an entirely different direction. Something like, “Hey, KW, we are re-directing your space capsule from the planet Mars to the planet Pluto.” Roight.

So I put on my archaeologist hat. Note that when I am not wearing it, it hangs on my cube wall, so beware when you are entering my cube. And I dug into the way-back machine. When did this obscure little page get designed? What kind of conversations led up to this design decision? Or maybe it just got overlooked and the dev team did their own thing. That would be unusual but it does happen.

In the end, I did not find the answer, despite the best efforts of a yelling-over-the-wall convo with my new cube neighbor FZ. That is, FZ has been with the company many many years longer than I have but moved to a cube kitty-corner from me today. I have decided that this issue is not a major issue although I will probably bring it up when we get serious about my next prodject. For now, I’m gonna hang my archaeologist hat back up in my cube and plod along into the typical future of my loverly IT job.

I do okay with info technology “archaeology”. I would not make a good archaeologist. I would probably get bored with some of the digging and cleaning and classifying and I do not know what else. If I were an on-site type archaeologist, I would be uncomfortable if I didn’t have regular access to a shower (that means at LEAST once a day). Yeah I know. I live in the god-forsaken Great Lakes State. We have a lot of problems but we have fresh water pretty much everywhere.

But yay for archaeologists! We need them and we need to value their knowledge and skills more than we do. Just like we need musicians and artists and those very valuable folks who can’t quite quantify their skills but have a way of making the trains run on time. And TEACHERS! Fer kee-reist, how did I fergit to include those often thankless, underpaid professionals! All of those professionals are just as important as engineers and doctors et al but that would be a whole ‘nother post and I am about done for today.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.