PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

April 2 2004

Interweb Wrangler

One of the more onerous duties of being a web architect is answering the ubiquitous small talk lead-in, “So, what do you do?”

To the unacquainted, it may appear to be an easy and straightforward question, equal in simplicity to questions like, “how are you?”, or, “did you happen to see a small monkey in a tutu come by this way?”, when in fact supplying an adequate response is a Byzantine process that depends upon the following criteria:

1. Do you actually know what web architecture is?
2. Are you really just wasting time until the one person you know at this party shows up so you can say “hi” and leave?
3. Does this person that you’re talking to give a crap?
4. Are you trying to get into this person’s pants?
5. Could this person tell you the difference between AOL and the Internet?

In most cases, a “yes” to two or more of these questions leads you to assume that you are dealing with a technologically competent individual, and you, confident in your assertion that a short job description would suffice, proffer the following.

“I’m a website architect” — the addition of “-site” eased into your job title, just in case the inquirer is susceptible to thoughts of you being some kind of bioengineer who is trying to recreate spiderwebs.

The response comes back to you like a post-garlic-festival belch, “Oh, you make web pages!”, a response that sweeps the very foundation of hierarchical superiority out from under you and lays you down flat next to the guy who advertises web design services on Craigslist and openly admits he works exclusively in FrontPage.

Telling a web architect that he makes web pages is akin to describing a neurosurgeon as one who shaves people’s heads, a tax accountant who does math well, a trial lawyer who knows how to use Lexis-Nexis — all true, but completely missing the crux of what the profession is about.

“Well,” you say, with the appropriately sympathetic but hubristic intonation, “I lay out the plan for the entire site, how people move through it, what to call everything, where to put things on each page, etc., etc.”

“Oh, so it’s more like project management?” is the next attempt at summarizing your job, which is now tangentially moving away from your explanation. At this point, you determine that continuing any further discussion about contingency design, controlled vocabularies, and n-tier acrhitectures would be unproductive.

“Yeah, pretty much,” you concede.

And for the remainder of the day, you simply answer, “Yes. Yes, I do make web pages. Have you ever been whitehouse.com?”

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