A Fixer-Upper

I always think that things can be fixed quickly. Just as, when I was in school, I assume that if I didn't get something, I couldn't get it, I for the longest time thought that if I couldn't fix something quickly, then I couldn't fix it. The idea that something was fixable as a series of steps didn't even occur to me.

Complex solutions don''t easily occur to me. Its not so much solutions that require multiple areas of knowledge, or patience over time, but solutions that are composed of multiple interlocking steps. And it flummoxes me that there are problems which may not be solvable at all unless you're willing to be very flexible in what you call a 'solution', and even then, if you don't have access to multiple pieces of information and knowledge, you might not be able to solve it. The project that I worked on for almost a year, off and on, without getting it to work, was like that. It wasn't conceptually a difficult project -- yes, you had to know multiple technical concepts, but its not like they were impossible to know, and you usually didn't have to know them in depth, so long as you knew the 'magic words' -- but it took so long, and so much patience, with so much need for involvement by people who really didn't care, and weren't forthcoming with helpful information, and it was so flippin' unclear about why it didn't work when it didn't work (and sometimes, even figuring out if it was working or not was problematic, to put it mildly), that I just about lost my mind over it. This is doable, I thought, but not doable by me. I don't have the right mindset. This bugged me, though. I don't like failing at something.

For that reason, it is a mild pleasure to see the people who are trying to make it work now coming to the conclusion that this project and this product in our environment is quite difficult -- see, dammit, it wasn't just me! -- but I really do want it to work. And I want to know how to make it work. I have been watching closely as the people doing it do their things, hit their roadblocks, and I try to learn from their problems.

I want to be able to make it work. I want to be able to fix it.