stupid

I'm feeling pretty stupid at work lately. Like right now. And the only thing I can do to combat this stupidity is to stare blankly at the document I'm supposed to be writing -- or blog.

I'm going to grad school online to get a masters degree in instructional design. What's that you ask? I didn't know until I came into this training department. Basically, an instructional designer develops training (courses) that are optimized for learning.

Why am I doing this? Well, I was hired in the training department to do administrative stuff. Pretty boring. I quickly branched out to teach myself how to use Flash and other tools that were used for developing training courses. I also watched what the instructional designers were doing and thought "Hey, I can do that". And in a moment of spontaneity, I enrolled in an online program to get my masters. It was a good thing, too because the workload had slowed and my manager needed to cut some staff. I stayed because I was able to expand my skill set.

So now I'm doing project management work for the development of a course for the SOX-404 Compliance Process. There has been a huge turnover in the people assigned to my project, so when I lost one of the instructional designers, I volunteered to write one of the sections of the course.

At the time I thought it was a brilliant idea. I would be applying exactly what I was learning in my grad school courses. But the real world rarely mirrors what is taught in school.

The content of the course I'm writing is dull. Financial information always is. I've lost the initial excitement and now I feel stuck. A new instructional designer joined the team last week and she is young, pretty and really knows her stuff. She is grasping the content and knows the route she wants to take to develop interesting and successful material.

I sit staring at the computer going back and forth over using "but" or "however".

I hate my job. I need a new career. Maybe a face-painter at traveling circuses.