The creation of content types is a long, tedious process that nobody likes to do. Especially the users for whom's lives will be made easier because of them. But no one ever wants to participate. Most of the time users get upset. "I don't have time for this!!" Is a common excuse. The snarky remark that I always have to bite back, is "But you have time to search through endless, meaningless documents clumped together in a mess?"
I bite back the remark, because the user is normally only thinking of the workload they have in front of them. The questions I ask pull time away from that workload. The delayed gratification of using the content type to simply information retrieval isn't seen. The questions I ask require a bit of thinking outside the box. What I have found is that people HATE thinking outside the box. They like the box very much.
What really really really gets me is that this type of work exposes all of the office behavior that I detest. The office suckups and yes people will jump on their manager's band wagon. The tattle-tales will complain to their managers, or complain to mine that I am taking time away from work. The lazy will just wait around until someone else does it. The unimaginative will simply hand back what you already know or what you have already told them. And the resistant to change will throw a fit, because this isn't how they have done it in the past.
It boils down to the seemingly universal thought that it is better to put out fires than to do the legwork to prevent the fires from starting in the first place. It also has to do with the fact that most people do not like to think about anything that is more than one layer deep. It is the same thinking that makes everyone want to shove all links to all pages on the "home" page of intranets.
*SIGH*
Back to the grind.
