Last week I talked with another theatre-person-turned-tech-monkey (we were, you may not be surprised to hear, sitting in a bar after work). Once we'd energetically expressed how we felt about our jobs, we moved on to the actual work we do. I think it's an important distinction that I've only recently begun to really understand: a job is a situation; work is an activity.

I mentioned that I'd put the work I do for money these days on par with solving crossword puzzles. I enjoy it - it's reasonably challenging, alternately satisfying and frustrating, and I learn a thing or two while I'm doing it. But I'm not doing anything important in the grand or even baby grand scheme of things, and it's not something I'm willing to spend 40+ hours a week doing for years on end.

But tonight, after a thirteen-hour day, I realized the crossword puzzle analogy doesn't quite cover it. My work is more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle -- a 25,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, let's say of an alpine meadow covered in wildflowers (and put a crystal blue lake in the background...we'll need it later).

The tricky bit is that it only takes about 900 pieces to put together an ideal meadow.

Some of the extra pieces are nearly identical to the ones in the quintessential meadow, but they don't fit together perfectly, or the colors are just a little off. If you have an insane puzzle completion deadline, you will either work overtime looking for better pieces, or you will settle for what you have. If you are a perfectionist, you will most likely end up doing both.

Other extra pieces seem to fit in the meadow, but once you put them together you see they don't actually belong in the picture. Sometimes they form components that are just odd, awkward, or inconvenient - say a pink aluminum Christmas tree blocking the view of the lake. But sometimes they form a screaming baboon about to throw a fistful of feces, or a ten-foot high pile of roadkill, or a WalMart. So then you have to pick out those pieces, and find an elegant way to pull the meadow back together.

Good puzzle builders will ditch these pieces before they waste much time on them, but sadly matters are complicated by the fact that some of those useless pieces have little stars on the back that indicate Someone Important Is Firmly Convinced This Piece Belongs in the Puzzle. Then you spend a lot of time in meetings trying to persuade the right people that the meadow is really better off without all the baboon feces.

If you have an insane puzzle completion deadline, you probably won't have time to make your case properly, and relying on the theory that adding a screaming baboon with a fistful of feces to a beautiful alpine meadow is self-evidently bad will get you nowhere, because -- unbeknownst to you, the puzzle builder -- it's not really about including the baboon. It's about including some other object on the required puzzle piece, a small blot you could easily accommodate in the beautiful alpine meadow, possibly disguised as a Ricola cough drop.

But no one will ever tell you it's really about that one little splotch of color, so you will be forced conclude that the Powers That Be are feces-loving morons, when in fact they are just incredibly poor communicators.

Sometimes the only way you can get the crap out of the picture is by including a pink aluminum Christmas tree, and you tell yourself, "Well, at least it's a tree."