warning: may contain old man yelling at cloud

I guess it’s good news that I haven’t had reason to bitch about work for over six months since I started this new job. It’s a good job, with a great group of people (both locally and across the country), and I get to do all sorts of interesting software system design stuff in areas I haven’t necessarily tried before, so I’m learning new skills and polishing the tarnish off some old ones. All told, it’s pretty awesome, and I’m glad I’m here.

That said, it’s not without it’s frustrations. Soon after I started here, I inherited sysadmin duties for a service that allows our vendors to receive weekly financial data extracts via secure FTP. I collect information, validate identities, and set up accounts, and answer questions. Not a theoretical big deal.

However, what I end up doing six or seven times a day is explaining “arcane” internet lore to non-technical folks whose online navigational knowledge consists of little beyond “Click on the blue E, scroll through Facebook”. I had two different conversations with private industry IT Guys™ this week who didn’t know what an FTP client application was, and couldn’t conceive of the idea of doing something on the internet that didn’t involve a web browser.

Yes, I recognize that this isn’t the most elegant solution to distributing this data, but it’s what I inherited, it works, and the web services guys have bigger problems to deal with than writing a web interface for this thing. Besides, some of my users have done some really neat things on their end with the raw data we give them. But, I expect it would save me a lot of time if there was just a “click the E” version. For one, I wouldn’t have to keep providing uncompensated tech support for FileZilla every damned day.

Oh well – I guess I just have to consider it my humble contribution to the open source movement.

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Okay, I recognize this kind of whining is coming from a very specialized place. Most people don’t need to know how to do much with their computers besides opening up a web browser or spreadsheet. I call a plumber when my sink backs up, and I’ve learned that most home improvement projects turn out better when I pay someone else to do them. i don’t really fix my car myself anymore. I guess my frustration comes from the fact that although I don’t do these things myself, I know what a wrench is, and I can explain how an internal combustion engine works. When I was a student, the computing classes they made us take included at least passing mentions of basic computer things and rudimentary online stuff.

I guess part of it is a generational thing. People a few years older than me didn’t have computers around in school , especially those earlier ones that required you to type arcane-sounding commands like LOAD “*”,8,1 at a prompt to get them to do anything, and lack the experience. Those damned kids even a few years younger than me grew up with graphical user interfaces where conucopias of porn and pirated music were a few mouse clicks away*. I landed somewhere in the middle, where we had these things, they were new and shiny and interesting, and required a bit of thought and learning to make them do things, but it was worth learning that stuff, because it got you access to all kinds of amazing things. As a result, both the older and younger generations frustrate me, because I have to explain all this crap to both of them on a daily basis.

At least I get paid for it now.

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* – those of us who were on the cusp of the internet revolution waited like half an hour for a low-res bitmap scan of a magazine centerfold to download on our 9600 baud modems, and we liked it!