Granted, this is part and parcel for almost every job imaginable (folks, when you see traffic repairs going on, that's not the best crew out there but more likely the cheapest. Something to think about when you drive over or under a bridge next time). Normally a job like this gets sent out to India (yes, hard to believe that a country that has an idiosyncratic phone system and a hankering for giving a nuclear wedgie to Pakistan is handling our electronic data). Well, my underboss (more on that later) told someone that we could do a job cheaper than India. By "we" he meant "me." On something I've never done before. So I've been burying myself in this job for eight hours a day and trying to keep other barbarian co-workers from crashing my gates and asking for maps or reports or whatever. It always helps my mood when I can picture the office as a game of Risk.

And if this were Risk, our department would be Luxemburg. West Luxemburg to be exact. Our department is actually so small it’s a sub-department. Three guys run all of our GIS work, which is roughly 1 percent of our total company. I was actually a carry-over from East Luxemburg (the environmental end of the department). Technically I’m out on loan, but there’s a better chance of them shipping Lenin’s body to D.C. before I get to slog through another wetland.