Deja Vu at Unique Boutique
I work in the software industry and I enjoy it and appreciate it, but I’ve been telling people for years that if the software thing doesn’t work out, I’m going to work in a dress shop instead.
I have a particular dress shop in mind, I was there about ten years ago, when visiting my brother’s friends in Colorado. I had been working in software for about five years by then, long enough to know the feeling of creating something interesting and important and also the feeling of being one small piece of a huge corporate enterprise that didn’t really need me or anyone, really, in particular.
My brother’s friend worked at this dress shop and her job fascinated me. When a woman came into the shop, my brother’s friend would talk with her, listen to her and find her just the right dress for her style and figure and budget. It was such a personal and direct interaction. So different than writing lines of code to run on some unknown machine by an unknown user who I would never meet.
Then yesterday, without even trying, I visited this same dress shop again…
I hadn’t remembered the name of the dress shop or the town it was in, but the family and I went to Nederland yesterday, just twenty minutes from where we are staying outside of Boulder and I got a strange sense of deja vu.
It started when we were at the visitor’s center where there was a t-shirt or a sign or something about there being 1,000 people in Nederland and 2,000 dogs. That reminded me of my trip to Colorado with my brother. His friends had a bar-b-que and there were fifteen people and twenty dogs.
We took a hike along the creek, then walked into town and I noticed that the grocery store looked familiar, being near the creek, with a large parking lot with little shops across the way. That was the setup in the other town and the dress shop had been one of the stores across the way.
Well, there are probably hundreds of small towns in the mountains of Colorado with a creek and a grocery store and shops, but we ask a woman at the coffee shop and she knows the dress shop I’m talking about. The name has changed to Unique Boutique and they moved to another building a little further down the street, but the dresses are the same and here it is…
We walked inside and I felt like I found an old friend, since I’ve talked about this shop for so long, like maybe we went to High School together or something.
My brother’s friend doesn’t work there anymore, it is run by a woman named Brittney. She talked to me and listened to me and found me just the right dress for my style, figure and budget. Here it is…
I told her about my idea to give up software and work in a dress shop and guess what? She was a programmer who quit to work in this dress shop. She does the web site for the dress shop now, so she gets to use her technical skills and also have lots of the personal, direct interaction.
Then I thought more about the job I have now. I don’t code anymore, I work with a team to define the software process. I was telling Blue Eyes just the other day that my job really isn’t about the process flows or templates, it is about conversations I have with just one or two people at a time. It is these conversations where we talk and I listen and I help solve a problem that is real for them that are the heart of my job. When these conversations happen, the bigger picture of the larger process for the corporate enterprise comes together on its own.
I haven’t always done it this way. I used to start with the process flows and templates. I want to pay more attention to this new way of thinking about it, that the personal, direct interactions with people are my real job. Maybe I am working in the dress shop after all.
