Sometimes it is easier to remember the downside of a job and we need to be reminded that many jobs have a upside. My favorite job was working for the ASPCA redesigning an animal shelter management tool called, PetWhere.
During the redesign of PetWhere, we spent much of our time helping the folks who were using the older version of the software. PetWhere had some interesting quirks that would imbed data from other programs into the database, if it crashed. So, if you were working on a Word document while using PetWhere, it would insert parts of the Word document into PetWhere’s database. This quirk forced us to spend a lot of time helping animal shelters clean up their database.
I enjoyed playing the role of saving the day. One of the nice feature of PetWhere was the ability to open the software data files in a spreadsheet program and you could scroll through the data and easily find the corrupt data. It felt good to recover the data when the shelter staff believed that their data was lost for good.
I would have loved to spend my entire career digging through data, but funding for the redesign was exhausted because we tried to fix too many things in the first version. Sometimes it is just better to stay with baby steps.