sadmac

Recently I’ve been pressed pretty frequently to answer these uncomfortable questions:

“So, what do you do?”

“What kind of work do you want to do?”

These probably wouldn’t be so uncomfortable except, answering that you’re freelancing when work is not really coming in probably comes across like the honest truth which is essentially unemployment. Fine, but I was surprised to find how hard it is for me to answer the second question.

Nearly every job I’ve ever had has been technology related. Yes the responsibilities have spanned from desktop support to phone support to document formatting to web and application development, but the only two jobs which immediately come to mind which were not compu-centric were selling inline skates at Oshman’s Sporting Goods and being a fantastic barista at Starbucks. I do not make any claims that my pre-degree-finishing work history was stellar by any means, but nevertheless there is a clear thread tying these things together.

Furthermore, every avocation with which I have seriously stuck has been heavily computer controlled and/or influenced. When I think of the time, money and effort I’ve put into starting, building, pairing down and refining whatever this whole musical movement in my life has been, there is no time past 8th grade in which I was not 95% primarily concerned with how the devices and instruments would tie into a central computer system.

So generally I’m one of those guys who has always surrounded himself by high technology, and has used it in about two billion different ways. I’ve been an experimenter, doing things just for the sake of seeing it work them taking it back apart (the days of the multi-floppy linux installs + dialup connectivity were very formative). However, there are a few problems with my suddenly declaring myself an “aficionado” and fighting off the instant demand for my consulting time and opinions.

First, my formal education is in humanities. I started in computer science in 1994, but after the ten year trail came to an end, I ended up with a dual-major B.A. in Spanish/Christianity. My intent had been to continue through the academic hoops to a PhD and teach Hebrew at the University level, while researching ancient documents out of everybody’s way. Well this got as far as becoming a graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I only spent 5 months before the unexpected pre-arrival realization of my daughter came and we had to move back to the U.S. Clearly the market for Spanish/Christianity majors is very low, unless you want to teach Spanish in public schools, which would probably result in my death by insanity or bullet. When I go to an interview or a tech conference, I find that I’m always receiving very odd looks as I try to quickly explain away what I’m doing trying to get a programming job with little to no experience and lacking a degree in Comp Sci. There’s just little immediate mesh between the disciplines, and it is obvious even to me, and except that I am occasionally able to sell myself aside from the paperwork, it really works against me.
Second, my work history sucks. I’ll be honest, everything up to actually receiving my degree is pretty hit or miss. I never stayed anywhere too long, and the jobs themselves were nothing to be excited about. I had planned for my formal academic trail to be a proper revision of that, and to a point it is demonstrating that I’m able to handle a heavy workload on some very complicated specific topics with top marks and recognition. However, with the abort of the overseas graduate school plans came the clear lack of a “Plan B”. I have basically been freelance consulting to some degree for the last two years since we’ve been back, with a few minor jobs in between, but with nothing serious for long, I look like an incompetent slacker again. This is a bad, bad time for that, seeing as I’m no longer just responsible for myself.

Finally, there is the synergistic affect of the mismatched education and the embarrassing work record which does nothing but make me feel less and less inclined to ever approach someone else for “a job” again. There is, clearly, always some element of begging when pro actively applying for a job. When you consistently get beaten over the head by your own mistakes, about which 10 years later there is nothing that can be done, it gets easier and easier just to stop bothering. Working from home would be great, if the work came in regularly and the clients were all of the same caliber. For example, I have one client who is pretty high-maintenance but who really knows what he wants and can express it both in writing and in mock-ups without prodding. I have another to whom I am about to give a refund because his continued work on the backend DB which he had supposedly finished before I signed onto the project has dragged out to a month and a half over where I thought it would end, and it’s not even worth doing hourwise to get the other half of the already barrel-bottom scraping price I had bid. But, when the work isn’t coming in (and one thing I am not is a salesperson out hustling), or when the one-man-team concept ends up costing a lot of extra time in research and revision, the hourly rate begins to approach a limit and that limit is 0. Still, I honestly feel that I’m more likely to get another “actual job” without sending my resume than with!

Stop the madness! All the things that had seemed unimportant after a decade come bubbling back to mind: salutatorian of the class of 1994, massive scholarship offers from just about everywhere, licensed minister (that’s another story, and yes its legitimate not the ULC or other hokeyness), named outstanding graduating senior in both Hebrew and Spanish upon completing undergrad work, admitted to the best program in the world for Ancient Near-Eastern Semitic study and lived in Jerusalem, Israel, incredibly talented self-taught producer/musician, self-taught programmer able to jump into just about any language to a degree enough to get something useful out of it. I’m a pretty awesome dude, I just have had a lot of unfortunate experiences (stay-tuned for some corporate anecdotes in the near future) and made a lot of bad decisions.

In other words, I’m just like a lot of other people in the world right now who have had bad luck in the game, and despite their own potential, just aren’t able to play it anymore. So I have to reinvent myself, and I think I have. I am one of the few extremely technically inclined humanities graduates I know, and yet I am cogent enough to recognize that I am not and may never be on the level of the programming demi-gods such as Guido van Rossum and Larry Wall nor the majority of their power-users. I am right in the middle, and my ability to seamlessly communicate between the technical elite and the non-technical user makes me valuable -> I am Human Middleware.

Unfortunately, a brief search indicates that this term is not only not original with me, but it is actually used in a very negative light, referring primarily to that body of professionals who really don’t a) do the work nor b) make the decisions about the work on a useful macro nor micro level and yet c) seem to hold an awful lot of undue influence. (Think the majority of public school administration and middle-management.) As witness to the fact that it is very common now to appropriate a bit of vocabulary and re-assign it a new meaning, I hereby do so as of this moment. Human Middleware as I define myself refers to the position of being a useful catalyst for communication between two or more very different groups of humans - co-workers, employers/employees, or any number of other relationships - the purpose of which is to bridge the gap in understanding and let the implementor be the implementor while the end-user is the end-user. By keeping two sides of a potential technical communication nightmare held together and happy, everyone is allowed to not only be themselves but is allowed to be more of themselves than ever because they no longer have to be concerned with whether their output or request is correctly comprehended by the other party.

Human Middleware is not technical writing inasmuch as it is translation. I am the protocol on which the modern world should run.

And yet here I sit, completely broke, waiting for the day to end. What do I want to do? How about sit around and sing Hank Williams, Sr. covers?  There’s probably little market in that too.  A sad, sad mac indeed.