It was a peculiarly colorless three days I just spent in Orange County. The trip started pleasantly enough on the virtually empty flight down. I chatted with the flight attendant in first-class, who was not only a rare heterosexual, but who also flow most trips with his wife, another flight-attendant. He was a photographer in his free-time and we compared notes on pursuing a career in imaging while holding down a full-time job.

I'd travelled light so that I wouldn't need to check my bag. As a consequence, I'd left behind my running shoes and my personal laptop. Not even having a rental car, it meant that I'd be confined either to my hotel or to our Irvine office, which is five mintues walk through an office park from the hotel.

I arrived at our Irvine office at eight on each of the three mornings, and devoted myself to trying to reduce the chaos of the ever-enlarging project I'm tech-leading. For the moment, there are seven full-time developers working on the project, not including myself, and not to mention the three or four people I interact with at our customer's site. But, bit by bit, I'm feeling as if I'm losing my footing.

I've long felt that I'm extremely good at my job. But this is only the second time in my career when I've been at the helm of a complex project involving many people. And in both cases, there are a few qualities I've seemed to lack. For a long while, everything goes well, and I feel both the sense of accomplishment that comes from being on top of such a complex project, as well as the sense of connectedness that comes from interacting successfully with so many people.

Gradually, though, I find that too many issues are coming through me, and I'm starting to be a bottleneck, as my days begin to fill up with meetings, conference calls, and composing intricate diplomatic emails, leaving little time for the actual project tasks that fall to the tech-lead.

Superadded to this is a seeming inability to enforce certain consistent practices on the rest of the team. As tech lead, it's my job to make sure, for example, we all use the same names for files. This is crucial when you have multiple people working on the same project. But there's a conflict between, on the one hand, taking up peoples' time to make sure they're aware of and following the standards, and, on the other hand, between letting them get on with their individual tasks.

This problem is exacerbated when there are people on the team who are more experienced than I am. Like Neil, for example, the lead developer. He's a very tall, kindly-looking, skinny guy of about my age who looks not unlike our local weatherman Bill Giles, and who will alwys, whatever his age, look like an overgrown grad student. Not only does he have a PhD, but he also has a much wider range of technical experience than I have. His massive competence makes it even harder for me to have the self-assurance to box him in to following the same practices as the rest of the team. And do I force him to use my standards, or do I adopt his?

These whole three days, then, I've felt grey and isolated, experiencing no joy either in the work, or back at the hotel, where I've had nothing much to do except read, eat room-service or watch TV, and wonder, deep down, if I'm really as proficient in my job as I'd thought I was. In some sense, the view of myself as being an extremely able technical leader is a core part of my self-image. And it's not a nice experience to feel that self- image tottering in the stiff gale of a complicated project.

All of these thoughts were passing through my head as I flew home yesterday evening, flying straight into a thick fog and a lashing rain which meant we were already an hour or so late. The reason I'd wanted to be able to carry-on my luggage is so that I could make a quick get away once back home, in time to catch my screen-writing class. But as we neared San Francisco, and circled the airport for what seemed like an hour in an impenetrable fog, I began to think I'd be late.

In the end, I arrived in class on-time, straight from a hair-raising ride through the rain from the airport; perfect timing. Last week, half of the class had had to take turns pitching their story idea, and tonight it was the turn of the rest of us, including myself. When it was my turn, I found that in the very instant that I started to speak, I became unbearably nervous. As I pushed myself through the pitch (for a story that cuts very close to home), stammering, shaking and anxious, feeling like I was bearing huge parts of myself to almost complete strangers, my biggest fear was that I'd lose their interest.

I'm being a little dishonest there. Really, my enormous, not quite admitted, fear was that in opening up myself like this, that the rest of the class would see who I was, and, in rejecting my story idea (or finding it disinteresting) would be, in reality, rejecting me, saying that I was not a whole person. I would never have thought, just five minutes previously, that the pitch would become such a crucial issue for me. It's at times like this that I wish fervently I could be just a simple, happy-go-lucky guy.

Astonishingly, as the teacher drew me out, I realized that the worst of it was over. But not only that, I saw that the class was interested in my story, and some of them were touched by the moment of rawness that I hadn't been able to hide. I felt like I'd been dragged over raw coals, But, at the same time, I felt that I'd touched the real reason that people like me should be in the story-telling business at all.