jr conlin's ink stained banana

At work, we're allowed to make up titles. The good is that folks can be fairly creative about things and you get jokers like me putting stuff like "infinite monkey wrangler" or "corporate five-year-old" on their business cards. It's kinda nice because it's harder to pigeon hole people who go by the title of "freelance troublemaker" than someone who is a "Class III Platform Engineer - Apache"

The problem is that for certain varieties of joker (like me), it's not really easy to peg what the hell i'm supposed to be doing.

That leads to kind of interesting situations like i'm currently in.

Officially, i'm not the lead engineer, architect, operations support, technical manager or really any of the other sorts of positions that one would assume would be on a project such as mine. All of those positions are currently officially filled by well qualified individuals i have a great deal of respect for. Mind you, i tend to do all those jobs anyway, plus toss in customer support, prototyping, front-end, database managment, developer relations (internal and external) and head cook and bottle washer to boot.

My boss tends to forget about me sometimes, which is fine since i just try to keep him up-to-date about most of the important stuff, and he does the same. Granted, i'm at that point where i damn well shouldn't need someone standing over my shoulder, but i'm sure we both feel like we're more out of the loop than we really are. Likewise, when folks want to talk to my department, i'm usually the guy they talk to. There's no official policy about that, they just do. i don't mind, but it does mean a lot of meetings and phone calls when i've got stuff piling up (Kinda like recently. Seriously, if i make it 'til May, it'll be a miracle.)

i guess my biggest problem is thinking about what i'll put on my resume. That's where being stuffed into a hole is sort of useful because in the .004 miliseconds your resume is actually reviewed, they look for stuff like "manager" or "architect" or "principal". Ok, they don't. The regular expressions in their Resume-select-o-matic do, but still, that's how folks are sorted. Employment filters have a really hard time figuring out which of the five buckets a nine-year professional hand-grenade blanket like me fits into. (i'm guessing it's equally hard for folks that know me to justify why they should hire me. "He's a really useful guy" doesn't make accountants and hiring executives horribly happy.)

Perhaps i just need to figure out how to brand and market myself better. Wonder if i can get the rights to brand myself with Swiss Army ® or Leatherman ®…