After just one day on the new job, I realized something that I had forgotten- I actually really hate the internet. No, not for surfing and playing on, but as a thing to work on. Why? Because nothing online really actually exists.

See, I used to do Print Production. That meant film. Film exists- you can touch it and feel it and bend it and sometimes even smell it. You can also ship it and fix things to it and accidentally fuck it up when you leave it on the floor and roll your chair over it. And yeah, film is becoming less and less rare and print is becoming more and more electronicish, but at some point, something physical is produced.

But not on the Web. Nothing is real, or at least real in a physical sense (and yes, I am getting way meta-physical and I realize that in the Star Trek universe things that exist "electronically" do exist but do I really want to show off what I geek I am?). Which is why it's usually so frickin' hard to understand what the hell a job is about or what a job does. Today, I spent half of the day hearing about "inventory." Now, according to the dictionary, inventory is "a detailed, itemized list, report, or record of things in one's possession, especially a periodic survey of all goods and materials in stock." In other words, the amount of actual things you have. On the Web, when you're only involved in things involving Web sites and there is no actual product or item, there is no inventory. But there is. After hearing about it all day, I'm still not sure about what the hell inventory is. All I know is it doesn't refer to a thing that exists per se.

My job is to do basically a certain amount of project coordinating. I like project coordinating. But I like coordinating things that actually there's kind of a common sense way of fixing them. It's a physical problem so you fix it in a physical way. If a blizzard knocks out FedEx, you find another way of shipping it or ask for more time. Or if the Fed/Ex package opens up on the way to the printer, you run out new film. If something goes wrong on the Web, I dunno. Could be a server issue or network conductivity issue or back-end user support issue and if so, yawn. Or it usually is coding problems. Coding problems are boring- a slash going the other way, a letter being capitalized when it shouldn't be, a space here where there shouldn't be one. In other words, it's like proof reading and I hate proof reading (which y'all are probably aware of because how many grammatical/spelling errors I make on a consistent basis). No frantic phone calls to try and find a way out of a solution.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I'm gonna be coordinating projects, I want those projects that I'm coordinating to involve something that actually exists. Coordinating non-existent things is pretty darn boring.