I’m a very emo cog.

My work day has been lately full of despair. Decades ago, I’m given to understand, some researchers at the UW did some experiments in which they ran mice regularly through mazes, shocking them for wrong turns — and then, just when the mice started getting good at it, changing the maze. They also would put monkeys (cute little monkeys, I can only assume) at the bottom of a huge cone with an opening at the top, just out of the monkey’s reach — so they could jump and jump for freedom, but never quite escape. If they also had done an experiment in which they made some other adorable animal, perhaps a hedgehog, aware of a gigantic anvil falling very slowly towards them an hour or so before impact — and then made the delivery of food conditional upon their willingness to endure the impact, they would have managed to perfectly replicate my current work environment. Minus, I suppose, the repeated exposure to badly-written software.

I’m ill-suited to being a cog. I’m really, really not good at it. I have thoughts like “why am I turning in this direction” and “what is this machine supposed to do” and “why aren’t we hooked up slightly differently,” all of which are horrible thoughts for a cog to have. Because if the cog concludes that the machine isn’t doing what it should be doing, or that the direction it’s turning is actively hurting the machine, it becomes knowingly complicit in the machine’s flawed operation.
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I think we’re ultimately going to make things better, I really do. And I know we all want to serve our students and our faculty to the full extent of our powers. And I still enjoy the feeling of showing someone a really, really basic SQL report or something that exposes data they’ve wanted to see for years but haven’t been able to get. But I feel like there’s this building swell of frustration just behind me, hovering right over my shoulder, that’s currently slamming up against a giant wall of ossified bureaucracy and willful ignorance, and it actually creates palpable pressure inside my brain now and then. I can feel it.

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