I had my thesaurus meeting and it went pretty well.
Luckily, the boss has done this herself and believes thesaurus work to be intellectually difficult work. So, basically, it’ll grow on me. And we all have the same basic priorities. Check.
As many of you can tell, I’m not exactly satisfied [although I stand by my claim that it went pretty well]. I have some other ideas/options and I’ll start rolling them out very soon.
For instance—duly noted, earlier today I was told that it should be time for me to call in my coffee date. The messenger had to duly note it from the source, and I duly noted it from the messenger. [One thing I do know after starting my military career on a nuclear missile site is how to duly note the important messages!]
I’ll just have to do some extracurricular work and bill for it. I’m already slotted for 5 hrs/wk right now and am only working 3 (for just one more week, then I’ll work more). This is a budget line in a grant and she wants me to work as many of the hours budgeted as I can.
There are possibilities here. I sure hope I can learn to visualize this thesaurus and have the time to make it well-structured and (vastly) more useful. Definite possibilities.
Anyway, the boss is relaxed about the issue of my “seeing” the thesaurus and thinks it will come to grow on me. There are ways to work on structure as a community, which agreed could be a very good thing. She understands it is not quick work.
So I basically feel better (for the moment) because my boss fully understands my concerns, likes what I’m up to, and thinks it’ll just take some time. Soon, my constant worrying will take over, but for now the boss is less concerned about my concerns than I am so I should enjoy that.
As for any specific short-term answers to help me “see” the thesaurus, well, zip. Not a problem, in the short-term anyway. I’ll do an hour or two of thinking about questions that might help me understand some structure, I’ll print the 14 top terms and their list of terms (some anyway), I’ll talk with Jon and see if (some of) my questions make sense in terms of the database, have some run, call in my coffee date somewhere early in this process.
“Cliffhanger” is just about right for this. Certain of my radar are currently on overload. I do not like to feel better about a situation when my fundamental questions remain unanswered. Maybe it’s all those years of never being able to ever get answers to the fundamental questions. By the way, “all those years” includes a fair amount of library work; I was not just busting on the military. I guess it could be the case that sometimes forward progress can be made while still leaving the questions of basic import unanswered; that can only go on so long though.
’til the next episode…
