Guess this must be the SARS-CoV-2 edition. And nowadays it's always the attention deficit edition. Are we blogging again?
Our back deck is fibreglass because the carport is below. Every spring I have to power-wash tree crud and mould away because I no longer have the strength to scrub it away. I believe this is the earliest I've ever cleaned off the "winterfilth." If we ever have to go into full isolation, we're going to want that deck and the hammock and table and chairs that sit on it.
Power-washing the deck is a slow, boring task. Yesterday, I finally figured out how to turn it into a game. Instead of doing repeated straight lines, I swirled the nozzle around, like you would to erase something on a screen. A few swirls and I would see a clean chunk. A few more, another clean chunk. And the curved lines were somehow more satisfying than straight ones. I made the task artistic!
This is what happens when your brain needs a dopamine hit more often than most. I need stimulation to be able to get through a boring task. So I turn tasks into games.
All my most successful jobs were things I turned into games. After university, I worked in a circuit board factory using a digitizer. A digitizer is a device use to program for a numerically controlled drill to precisely drill holes in the specified places with the specified sizes. Mil-spec boards (from government contractors) had especially tight tolerances. The job consisted of drawing a series of coloured lines between holes of the same size, and then using the digitizer to follow the lines and set the coordinates of each hole to be drilled.
I quit after a couple of years, the only time I have ever voluntarily resigned from a job. Digitizing was a fun game, but it wasn't stimulating enough. I set out to find a job related to my English degree.
When I got my first job with a publishing company, it was not in editorial but rather in advertising production. I was an advertising production manager at two different technical trade publications. Every month I was responsible for creating a page imposition, which involves placing ads throughout an edition among the editorial content. I had to balance many different requirements, including keeping all of the advertisers happy with their positions in the magazine. It was like doing a giant crossword puzzle once a month, and I derived great satisfaction from it.
I was almost sorry to take a job as an assistant editor, a job I had (more or less) studied for. I could probably have done page impositions for a long time. I enjoyed my time as an editor and writer. But I couldn't turn it into a game quite as much. It's fortunate that it was a computer publication. There's plenty of stimulation in getting to know new software. The first graphical information system (GIS) I ever saw in the mid-1980s was already amazing, and particularly appealing. But after five years, I felt stuck.
A jump to a different part of the same company took me into software development. Writing software always has game elements to it. For me, "winning" was creating code that not only worked but did so as efficiently and elegantly as possible. Nobody wanted to build a kludge tower. I spent much of my career maintaining and extending a search server, constantly refactoring it to make the code easier to change when necessary.
By 1994 I was bored to tears, and I was fine with having to quit when I moved to Vancouver. But I ended up staying as a contractor. I did technical writing (mostly help text) for many years until I had been away from software for long enough to respond affirmatively to an offer to return to full time software employment.
That last couple of decades was a long stretch. When my talent for and tolerance of software development both started to reach their limit, I managed to stay useful and stimulated during my last few years before retirement by taking on a task no one else wanted: second-line technical customer service using Jira to track customer-reported bugs and feature requests. I evaluated the tickets that came from the front-line people and made sure they went through the system properly. It's the kind of job that you need an over-qualified person to do.
When the company first reformed its ticketing system, everything was late, and it was difficult to track issues correctly. But I was spurred on by a colleague who knew a lot about how Jira worked. I took his knowledge and went further until we had a solid tracking system that allowed us to stay ahead of deadlines, not constantly behind them. My part of the company went from one of the worst at customer service to the best. I found that using colour coding to track how soon a ticket was due to be especially appealing.
As illustrated by the deck cleaning, I turn most things I do into a game. Such is my life of attention deficit. It has its limitations. I can only imagine what life might have been life without this constant need for stimulation. But I made it to retirement, and I think I did good work. But even now, I can't escape the need for stimulation.
Our back deck is fibreglass because the carport is below. Every spring I have to power-wash tree crud and mould away because I no longer have the strength to scrub it away. I believe this is the earliest I've ever cleaned off the "winterfilth." If we ever have to go into full isolation, we're going to want that deck and the hammock and table and chairs that sit on it.
Power-washing the deck is a slow, boring task. Yesterday, I finally figured out how to turn it into a game. Instead of doing repeated straight lines, I swirled the nozzle around, like you would to erase something on a screen. A few swirls and I would see a clean chunk. A few more, another clean chunk. And the curved lines were somehow more satisfying than straight ones. I made the task artistic!
This is what happens when your brain needs a dopamine hit more often than most. I need stimulation to be able to get through a boring task. So I turn tasks into games.
All my most successful jobs were things I turned into games. After university, I worked in a circuit board factory using a digitizer. A digitizer is a device use to program for a numerically controlled drill to precisely drill holes in the specified places with the specified sizes. Mil-spec boards (from government contractors) had especially tight tolerances. The job consisted of drawing a series of coloured lines between holes of the same size, and then using the digitizer to follow the lines and set the coordinates of each hole to be drilled.
I quit after a couple of years, the only time I have ever voluntarily resigned from a job. Digitizing was a fun game, but it wasn't stimulating enough. I set out to find a job related to my English degree.
When I got my first job with a publishing company, it was not in editorial but rather in advertising production. I was an advertising production manager at two different technical trade publications. Every month I was responsible for creating a page imposition, which involves placing ads throughout an edition among the editorial content. I had to balance many different requirements, including keeping all of the advertisers happy with their positions in the magazine. It was like doing a giant crossword puzzle once a month, and I derived great satisfaction from it.
I was almost sorry to take a job as an assistant editor, a job I had (more or less) studied for. I could probably have done page impositions for a long time. I enjoyed my time as an editor and writer. But I couldn't turn it into a game quite as much. It's fortunate that it was a computer publication. There's plenty of stimulation in getting to know new software. The first graphical information system (GIS) I ever saw in the mid-1980s was already amazing, and particularly appealing. But after five years, I felt stuck.
A jump to a different part of the same company took me into software development. Writing software always has game elements to it. For me, "winning" was creating code that not only worked but did so as efficiently and elegantly as possible. Nobody wanted to build a kludge tower. I spent much of my career maintaining and extending a search server, constantly refactoring it to make the code easier to change when necessary.
By 1994 I was bored to tears, and I was fine with having to quit when I moved to Vancouver. But I ended up staying as a contractor. I did technical writing (mostly help text) for many years until I had been away from software for long enough to respond affirmatively to an offer to return to full time software employment.
That last couple of decades was a long stretch. When my talent for and tolerance of software development both started to reach their limit, I managed to stay useful and stimulated during my last few years before retirement by taking on a task no one else wanted: second-line technical customer service using Jira to track customer-reported bugs and feature requests. I evaluated the tickets that came from the front-line people and made sure they went through the system properly. It's the kind of job that you need an over-qualified person to do.
When the company first reformed its ticketing system, everything was late, and it was difficult to track issues correctly. But I was spurred on by a colleague who knew a lot about how Jira worked. I took his knowledge and went further until we had a solid tracking system that allowed us to stay ahead of deadlines, not constantly behind them. My part of the company went from one of the worst at customer service to the best. I found that using colour coding to track how soon a ticket was due to be especially appealing.
As illustrated by the deck cleaning, I turn most things I do into a game. Such is my life of attention deficit. It has its limitations. I can only imagine what life might have been life without this constant need for stimulation. But I made it to retirement, and I think I did good work. But even now, I can't escape the need for stimulation.
