Troubleshooting
Had a rough day at work yesterday. Specifically, the task I was assigned to do had many hidden pitfalls. Going in, I wanted to be prepared and made at least one choice to try to mitigate for something I thought wasn’t in place. Which lead me to spending extra time getting an extra part I thought I needed, even more time trying to make that part work, and spend time undoing the unneeded mitigation because it looked like everything we needed was in place.
Sorry, I’m trying not to give too many client secrets away so this may be extra vague. You’d think that the above covered the whole dang process, but there was a second part, where I kept trying to make the parts I knew about work, until it turned out there were even more hidden parts that were silently causing another set of problems in the background, until I found and disabled them.
What could I have done better? I could have done more investigation in the beginning; some of the parts in place were available to me before I got onsite, and I could have found some of that out going in. Other parts were not known to me and had to be discovered onsite, though.
I could have gone through my troubleshooting faster, I suppose; I got mentally blocked by all the surprises and it slowed me down, and led me to asking my lead for more help. Help they’re happy to provide, and they insist they are not upset with me at all, but it weighs on my sense of duty, y’know? I’m very Capricorn Sun like that.
But troubleshooting, which is what I do for my job in my career, is often like that. You go into a new sitaution not knowing all the details, and finding out those details is the majority of the process. Only when you have the full picture can you start coming up with a solution. And it’s often the case that you try multiple solutions before you find the one that works. It’s not always obvious what solution will fix or resolve the problem, and that’s due to the fact that in a complex system you can’t know every factor that is involved.
Luckily the clients knew none of this. All they saw was a tech working away dilligently and in the end it all worked. They never said, to me at least, that I was taking too long, or that the job was easy and should have been finished faster. They just let me work and waited for it to be done. That was nice, and I appreciated that, but because I knew what was going on in my head – stress, anxiety, doubt – I still felt guilty.
But once I was able to clear all the known and unknown hurdles, the task was swiftly brought to a successful close. And that felt good, reaching the right conclusion after hours (literally hours, fuckitall) of confusion, frustration, and investigation. All’s well, that ends well.