* : Portal czars, not so much
Last week, I was remembering that in Vienna, there was a woman at the IAEA who had started an internal listserv geared towards expats' needs; apartments for rent, activities, used furniture, etc.
It was the best source of information in the city if you weren't Viennese, period. She built up a following over the years and spent anywhere from a couple of hours per week to a couple of hours per day administering it. Everybody loved the listserv because it was so helpful.
One day, the Director of IT decided that maybe using the organization's infrastructure for that kind of thing wasn't the best use of resources so he decided to shut her down. A bit of an uproar was caused by those on the list so the Director of IT sanctioned the creation of a web portal out of the listserv (which is where I came in as an analyst/developer.) He was willing to throw enough resources at the portal to get it built, but the Achilles' heel of that plan was that as soon as we gleaned all the requirements from the list owner, she was not to spend any more of her working time on it; we were going to automate everything.
During one meeting with the list owner late in the requirements gathering, it came to light that she was trying to parlay the situation into a full time job for herself (as portal administrator.) I'm sure she would have done a great job (but I wasn't in charge of budget decisions.) She gave her listserv the sort of personal touch (the added value if you will) that made everyones' lives better. I'm sure she would have done the same as the portal czar.
In the end, she didn't get the full-time job doing what she really wanted to be doing (and was really good at doing,) the listserv was officially terminated, and the portal project was shelved.
Today we learned how to conjugate verbs in the past perfect tense. OK, there are three groups of verbs (-ar, -ir, and -er) and with six different conjugations, that's 18 new possibilities. To practice, we played a game where one person starts by saying something they did yesterday. The next person repeats that sentence and then adds another sentence and so it goes around the room. Oh yeah, and throw in a couple of reflexive verbs that I didn't know how to deal with. I'm in a bit over my head but I'm loving it; it's a great challenge.
No, I don't mean football as in Soccer, even though football in that sense and Spanish would go quite well together as a blog post given media attention to the World Cup in recent weeks. No, I mean football as in "American football." Pigskin. Oblong, not round.
The connection sprang to mind today as I was in my Spanish conversation class (where, incidently, I'm the least experienced with one semester of Spanish whereas others have four or more.) I'll admit, I wasn't the most dilligent this weekend ('cause I was watching Football...) with my vocabulary so I wasn't exactly prepared to be called on to put together sentences on the clothes one wears in winter. And then I remembered what it used to be like to have football practice in August when I was about 15. I remembered how much I savored certain parts of practice, most of all when we had running hills for conditioning and I could tell that practice was almost over. Euphoria is the best word to describe the feeling. I knew the suffering would soon be done.
Don't get me wrong; I really like my Spanish class. It's just that everyone else has had a lot more Spanish and more vocabulary so I went from being the top student in my intro class (I've got the grade to prove it!) to the weakest link. I'm in a bit over my head but that's good for me, that's how I'll learn. But for the time being, I'll secretly admit that I feel relieved when we've just gone through an exercise where everyone (including me) has to comment on what happens in a given season and I know that we're going to finish class with ten minutes of a movie. Ahh......
