Here’s a story about how I ended up doing a bunch of remote work when working for a government agency that, on paper, did have a remote work policy, but would really have preferred if no one would ever ask about it.
The government agency had paid (or had agreed to pay) something like €235,000 to a provider to build a website.
This website was supposed to be an online payments platform to settle any and all payments owed to government from one single site, sorry, web portal, since we are talking government-speak here
It was a stupid amount of money to pay and it was a very silly choice of provider who was tasked to build it, but neither of those was my decision.
The interesting thing came here.
Somehow, this leading, bleeding edge technological provider, DID NOT HAVE A DESIGNER ON STAFF.
Plenty of apparently highly competent developers, but not one stinking designer.
And I, originally hired as a copywriter, was tasked with helping out.
Not my core competence, but I knew a little something, more than the staff the provider had, and not being in a position to refuse, I said, ok, I’ll mock up the screens and the user interactions for you with a wire framing tool.
“What’s the what what?”, came back the question from this very professional team.
OK, so they didn’t know what interactions were, and neither did they get the idea of a wireframe.
Bear in mind, there were far fewer tools back then, and Figma was a very primitive product indeed. This stuff was mostly done by hand.
“OK, tell me what you need”, I asked.
“Send us the screens in Photoshop and we will slice and export them in HTML.”, they said.
Urgh, a disgusting, lazy, shortcut-taking, bad way of working. Whatever, not my decision.
There was a problem, however.
The agency I worked at has no Photoshop licence.
But I do.
However, there is no Bring Your Own Device policy where I work, in fact, we don’t want your device here at all.
“OK then, no issue. I’ll work from home until I’m done on this project.”
OK, no more than 1-2 days a week please, they said.
Sure.
Honestly, my intention was to work on this project, conclude as quickly as possible, and be done with it, not because I didn’t want to work from home (I did), but because I:
- realised that designing the look and feel of a website for an external provider is not a great path towards raising my profile internally and getting promoted,
- and that if I wanted to do that, I needed to be working on projects that were more internally driven and therefore visible to decision makers,
- and I had other shit to do.
But, with the incredible scope creep that’s inbuilt into all government projects, I quickly ended up doing 4 days a week on this project, week after week after week.
And that really irked some people off, that this young know-it-all upstart is just not turning up at work, and how do we even know he’s working anyway, huh?
Anyway, in the end, I spent months working my butt off on this project, handed over “the screens” (as the wireframes were now called), and waved goodbye to any hope that something decent would ever come of my work.
And I wasn’t wrong.
When the website launched to some fanfare, it was a sorry, pitiful thing, it ran (very slowly, laden with bugs and constantly giving errors) for a few months, before, very quietly and hush hush, it was taken offline, never to surface again.
And you know what, that’s probably the best outcome I could have hoped for.
