My first time operating CCTV cameras I was handed control over what was essentially 50 independently moving eyes that collectively covered an area about the size of a football field and from that experience I now know that
- Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass
- It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE
- After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.
- Once you are aware of an unreachable blind spot it nags at you constantly and you can feel it like a hard little lump under your skin you need to poke and scratch at and it’s ardghgguychgghhbhhhbhhh
And on top of that, having operated CCTV at multiple locations now- my favourite and most comfortable one having excess of 60 cameras- it can be REALLY hard to suddenly jump to a different operating interface and display configuration, because all the muscle memory is wrong
On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.
Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet
The closest I imagine I can equate it to is like. Getting really really good at painting with a pair of prosthetic hands, and then suddenly having them swapped out with someone else’s


















