CWRU called back to say that they finished interviewing people for this Windows sysadmin job and I am “one of the finalists”, so please send them my references. I wonder if that's for real, or if it's a ploy to give them an easy out if my references suck. One of my references is a former coworker and friend who has been certified as an MCSE+I, the highest Microsoft certification available; if he says I'm “good” and nothing further, it counts as approximately “good x 5”. I want this job, but I was surprised that I'm still in the running, and I'll be surprised if I get it.

The Mac consulting occurred. It was fantastic. It reminded me of what I find enjoyable and fulfilling in a job.

The woman of the house retired 6 months ago and got herself a flat-panel iMac, intending to do wonderful things with digital photos and email and burning CDs and scanning and printing and sharing files over the network with her husband's CRT iMac. Many of these things were not working for her. A mutual friend who knew I was looking for work sent me to them.

She had tried two other consultants, who had fixed a few things but not all, and made some other things worse. She hadn't been able to find another consultant in months, and had started to lose hope of getting the computer to do what she wanted.

Initially, I was to help her to burn a CD. It wasn't working according to the instructions she'd been given. When I fixed what had been wrong (a System Preference for what to do when a blank CD is inserted), we burned a CD, her face lit up, and she thought of another thing she'd like fixed. This continued for 5 hours, including some real stumpers that took some fighting to beat, until she couldn't think of anything else.

In the abstract, fixing random computer problems seems less fulfilling to me than designing and implementing software. But working for this woman for half a day reminded me that nothing is fulfilling in the abstract. Fixing her random computer problems made both of us smile a lot, which beats my final months of writing software at Noteworthy by an order of magnitude.

If I'm solving a problem for someone and I can watch them get happy and excited when it's done, I don't much care what type of problem it is: I'm doing the kind of work I enjoy.