Lack of Knowledge

I generally feel pretty excited to be at work on Wednesday mornings. Especially this week, since Friday was a holiday, after the five-day weekend I was totally ready to walk in there and kick some butt.

And I did.

For a while.

I cancelled all my morning meetings and did a huge amount of work. I made decisions, I figured out some of the stuff that had been frustrating me awhile, I called my teammates and organized stuff. By the time I walked into my 1pm meeting, I’d already accomplished more than half the items on my to-do list and I felt good.

I was in the zone.

The 1pm meeting wasn’t even for me. My application is supposed to use this library that’s written by another team and they wanted me to explain some of my object model so they could be sure the library would function properly. As I sat there explaining my system and its parts, they started talking about how I should organize the information so it would work. And I sat there trying to decipher what exactly they meant. I’m not familiar with the library as much as I’d like to be and I kept getting more and more frustrated as they spoke.

By the time I left the meeting, I was kaput for the rest of the day. I sat in my chair, deflated and unwilling to do anything. After a few minutes of trying to listen to my thoughts, I realized that it was my lack of knowledge that made me mad. I hate the idea of being involved with something I don’t fully understand. I’m not just talking about the fear of starting a new project where you’ve never done such a thing and you feel clueless and don’t have any idea where to even begin. This was worse than that. I have to use this library. I have to really understand it or I’m screwed. And right now, I don’t have the time to sit and learn it. I have a million other things I’m supposed to do for this project.

I think this is why I take so many classes, I hate being in an environment where I’m clueless and I have this intense need to learn everything so the two put together make my life all about school.

I guess it could be worse, though I’m not really sure anymore.

Previously? Conditioning.