New work situation

Today I have to guide someone into upgrading a very complex enterprise class software system. The fortunate thing is that the upgrade is being done in the test environment, not production, given that it's the first time I've done it on this software. The unfortunate thing is that by repute the woman I have to work with at the client is utterly incapable of doing anything except following instructions. A colleague of mine has to work with her this morning to troubleshoot a new development server that she installed, and didn't manage to get working, and his initial response to my question about what he was doing with her was "committing suicide".

Guiding people can be both simple and complex. There is a psychology involved in getting someone to do what you want, exactly, precisely, without any open domination such as I have with mitda and emmie. In this case I still need to dominate, but as an "expert" and not a master. I like the following quote on the difference between an expert and a master, though you'll have to extrapolate its meaning since it specifically is talking about the two in terms of art.

"Expertise and Mastery: an expert, like an Aristotelian phronimos, does the right thing at the right time and in the right way (and will be immediately recognized by his or her community as having done so); but a true master inaugurates a new discursive practice, often transforming the old standards of success in the process and so requiring more time to be recognized."

Obviously installing somebody else's software is not "inaugurating a new discursive practice" in any sense. It's as an expert, then, that I need to make myself known and try to garner respect for my instructions by having my domain knowledge validated in practice.

Mastery has to be validated in practice as well. emmie and mitda have been wonderful enough to give me their trust and respect quite freely, but having it and keeping it involves earning it all the more. In this comes the notion of responsibility, which I am currently studying and investigating as a result. As an expert at work, my responsibilities are limited - to this project, these products, etc. - while as a Master to emmie and mitda there are no limits to my responsibilities. Expressing this leads to a limitation in itself of language, and as Wittgenstein suggested, running up against the limits of language is ethics.