I stretched it out as best I could, because it was therapeutic as hell for me... the good thing I didn't even know that I needed.

I finished an unusual assignment yesterday. A week's worth of work: my timeframe is usually days or months. A technology outside my specialty: in automotive terms, I took time away from working on modern transmissions to swing a screwdriver at a sputtering carburetor. An objective of an increasingly rare breed: well-defined.

I was shocked into silence, midafternoon my first day there, when my boss-of-the-week smiled and said "That's exactly what I want." Not that that's never happened... but I hadn't realized how long it had been.

I've been spending lots of work time this year with people with decision-making disorders, where my role was more or less to reinforce their clarity. To support the way they were approaching their responsibilities, rather than simply discharging them. I couldn't help but think back to all the ways I'd been hamstrung in my previous gig...

Walking through the halls with my local contacts, the Information Technology guys I sat with and helped direct, over in the building where the business department paying my way was housed. Turning a corner, almost colliding with a lady coming the other way; tossing off a smile and an apologetic wisecrack as I passed. Having the most senior of the IT guys lean over to me a few steps later and deadpan "We don't use charm in this building." Catching his eye and being completely unable to tell if he was joking, or if that really qualified as charm around there.

Walking through the halls back at the IT building a few days later, simmering at the fact that I was going to replan the effort for the tenth time in eight weeks, because yet another of the assumptions written into my company's contract for the project had been tossed out the window without comment. Idly reading the nameplates on the arid, identical cubicles as I passed. Realizing that one of them simply said not a name like "Peter Gibbons" or "Michael Bolton" or "Samir Nagheenanajar", but simply "Denier". As if it were a job title there, like "Director" or "Janitor". They apparently had a whole job there, just for someone to say "No, that's not exactly what I want."

It's no wonder, after months of that kind of work, that a word of affirmation about my results would affect me like an oxygen rush, like the tingle of blood returning to a hand fallen asleep while somehow accidentally constrained. It fed the fire of me again, and I made damned sure that man was even happier when I left than he was when he first mentioned it. It was just a little thing, but I owed him for it. Did more for him longer that I ordinarily would have, just because it was genuinely working, in every sense.

I'm hoping that gives me a restart, that I've got something moving there. Hoping that I can start remembering how to add that dash of leadpipe cruelty, mercenary sensibility to my work again, that little extra intensity that leaves everyone a little more satisfied at the end of my day.

I needed the shakabuku. It'll be good. I think.