An irritability consultant?
I was on the the phone this morning with a software vendor, and, as I was describing what one of my clients was looking for, I mentioned to the salesperson that I was a usability consultant. She paused for a moment, and then, with an obvious bit of hesitation, asked me to repeat myself. I did, after which she laughed, a bit relieved, and said "oh, I thought you said you were an irritability consultant".The truth is, some days I feel a bit like an irritability consultant. As an independent consultant, I've got to manage my own irritability, my clients' irritability, and the irritability of the internet in general. For me, the last one is probably the worst. We techie types, especially programmers, are drawn to computers because they make sense to us. We like a bit of logic and order in our lives, and computers tend to play by the rules. Tie together millions of those computers into an ad-hoc network that we call the internet, though, and those rules break down pretty quickly. Trying to figure out if a slow site is my host's fault, AT&T's fault, someone in betweens' fault, a result of internet "weather", or a lack of pixie dust, and it's a wonder I still have any hair left.
Factor in those crazy people we call "users", and all bets are off. Some days, the best we can hope for is to just reduce everyone's irritability a little bit. Maybe irritability consulting isn't that far off the mark after all.
