Not It

Remember when you were a little kid and and you played the game of Not It?  Whoever could shout out first, “Not it,” was…well, not it.

But what was it, anyway?  Many times it meant you got out of doing something you disliked and the task fell on someone else’s shoulders.  Years later,  I’m still the kid who is it, who is too slow to proclaim Not It first, the responsible one who does not shirk duty or blame.

I worked with the web developer today.  We found the root of my problems with my department’s website.  He did the best he could and even admitted that the things that were wrong were the designers’ fault and not mine.

So for once, I’m vindicated, I didn’t ruin the layout, it was bad to begin with.  I am decidedly Not It.  But I won’t gloat or tell the truth to my bosses.  What would be the point?  The designers are gone now but they were beloved in my department.  They’re like Mary Poppins—practically perfect in every way—and I’m just the one who replaced them.  So their dirty little secret of badly written source code will remain between me, the web developer, and the great wide inter-web.