Old Bastard
Since starting this new job, I’ve had a hard time reconciling my ego with my actual knowledge. See, as it turns out, I don’t know everything. I know, it was a shocker to me as well.
At my last job, I almost did know everything. I was respected and people often came to me to ask questions about various things. This, of course, didn’t happen over night, but for some reason I have been having a difficult time remembering stupid-fresh-out-of-college-Diane.
I have to remind myself more often of the incident involving a water bottle and several thousand dollars worth of prototype electronics equipment…
But now I’m the new kid all over again. I was an expert in my old field, but in this new one, I only know the periphery. I know C++ like it’s English, but C# has some oddities I’m still picking up on. I know how to make things smaller and faster for the embedded world, but the whole “Enterprise system” concept is just barely attaching itself to my understanding.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’m failing. I learn more every day than I learned in the last year at my old job. This job has been exactly what I was hoping for. But my poor little brain just jumped out of the small suburban park where it was king of the jungle gym into the Boston Common, where I don’t even know if I could find a jungle gym…
Okay, maybe that didn’t make too much sense.
It’s hard for me to express just how I feel about this. It’s frustrating. I guess that’s really just it. I’m frustrated, but encouraged by day to day progress.
Luckily, I’ve been listening to a lot of my iPod lately. I went through a Ben-Folds-or-Nothing phase during the last two weeks of my commute from hell, and I got a lot of comfort out of the lyrics of the song after which this entry was titled. The tune still lingers in my ears.
Why you gotta act like you know
when you don’t know?
It’s okay…
if you don’t know everything.