Ok, I'm convinced, I'm a geek ... or something like that. I dunno. Life working for a software company is a life of change. Recently they took the team I'd been working with and split us up; 3 of us to one group; eight to another. My new manager was originally my manager's manager. You'd think going up a level would be a promotion, but no. At first I thought the plan was for me to work on the web user interface for a support tool, something that would be fine with me.

But it turned out that the manager thought that I could script. Um I can pretend to script but I'm not really a coder. I've taken a beginner's class in PERL and in javascript so I know things like "oops, that line is missing a semi colon" and "ah here is where they declare the variable" But I don't have the feel for it. Every script I have to tinker with is a struggle and there is much that is just beyond my knowledge level. But more to the point, while I enjoy problem solving, I don't enjoy scripting.

However, I can understand their confusion. I'ma very good problem solver. I'm good at seeing the whole picture, and picking out patterns. And I'm good at extrapolation. And I've really quick to learn new software.

So today I was talking to a co-worker from another group. They gave her a task, but didn't tell her how to accomplish it. "Have you ever used this program before?" she asked.

"Well, no," I said "I've dabbled a bit in a related type."

Her face fell in disappointment.

"So what's the problem?"

She explained that she was supposed to give commands from the command line, but didn't know how. And she had a nice little helper tool that COULD do the job - if only it didn't have an 80 character limit.

?80 character limit? That sounded strange to me.

I asked her to show me. She opened the helper tool, and showed me that she could paste in her commands but they truncated at 80 characters on the line.

Hmmm, I grabbed her mouse. Clicked tools - found something like a configure or preferences option. Found an entry that said 80 characters. Changed it to 200.

"Oh, but that didn't work, the margin rule is still there" Back into the menu, find another menu option, change THAT to 200 characters. Poof, problem solved. I do that kind of thing fairly frequently. I remember when I first started at this place within a week I was explaining the application we were using to people who had been there over a year. "I don't know why it does that" She'd say.

"Well, I do I'd respond. And then I'd explain the functionality of the application. I do that a lot too. I'm not good at taking "it can't do that" as an answer. Sometimes it really can't but a little out of the box thinking often reveals a way to accomplish the goal.

I think that is the key to my success. I focus more on the goal, than on the means.