Dirty hands

Being a consultant on software configuration management I am involved in investigating, assessing processes, talking to people to find out their needs and their favorite habits in their work and the reasons behind it, discussing about possible changes or improvements, reading documentation and reports, writing reports, considering and discussing ideas and possible options, alternatives and impact, convincing people, training or guiding them, etcetera etcetera.
In short, it involves a lot of talking, thinking, listening, writing and reading.

How nice it is to, now and then, be operating the keyboard to work on the commandline of a CM system, write trigger scripts and witness them actually working and doing what you want it to do, and get out the data you asked for.
How nice it is to be working in a flow, concentrated for several hours forgetting all notion of time? That's the real work!

Sometimes I wonder how managers cope... doing nothing the whole day long, day in day out, bearing heavy responsibilities and taking hard decisions. I am so glad I am a consultant, not a manager.