Not as fun in real life

I am currently reading a book called Stones into Schools, which is about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The book keeps me up at night; this real story is actually more thrilling than most of the fictional ones I've read. I originally thought the title referred to people throwing stones into the schools they were building, but it actually refers to taking stones, and turning them into schools, which I understand is not metaphorical. One of the events described in this saga is the print of an erroneous article by a global publication, which described a perceived insult to a certain major religion, and caused waves of rioting and violence. My first thoughts when reading about this incident were negative and directed towards the author of that article, however upon further reflection he is no more responsible than all of the people whose beliefs involve reacting to alleged insults by destroying things and killing people. For now, though, lets blame the author, because it contrasts better when I say that I'm glad my job does not involve life or death considerations. When I screw up, a big internet company loses some money. No one torches the building.

It does, however, now, involve interacting with people. Yes, it involved this before, but previously most of the people I interacted with were on my team, and we, united by our common goals, had disagreements only over the best, optimal, and/or correct way to do things. That changed when my boss left the company and my new boss, who is awesome by the way, took an interest in my...development, as an employee, and gave me more responsibility. You see being a programmer, I mean, developer, at this company, is a little like being in an RPG game. Right now I'm level 1 (its not actually called that). For me to get to level 2 (not called that either) I need to do a bunch of stuff including coordinating projects across teams. The word for this category of skill is cross-functional, which in my opinion means something different and far more useful than emails and meetings. I am actually in no hurry to reach this level 2, since I still often find myself lost among tangles of homegrown software that I don't particularly like. I don't really have the option to not progress. Its pretty much a part of my responsibilities.

So now I am in charge of managing one of our systems. This particular system is a--well who cares what it does. The important part is now I have to regularly talk to people on other teams. People whose goals don't necessarily align with mine. After not needing to interact with people, except to ask lots of questions, go to lunch, and reminisce about visual basic, for so long, I have noticed an acute difference between computers and people.

Lets say you are working with a computer, using a command line program. For those of you non-computer people, a command line program interacts with you by printing some words on the screen, and you type some words back. It is brilliantly simple and easy, and hollywood usually replaces such real systems with retarded graphical monstrosities that show things blinking or zooming around. But I digress. Lets say in the middle of using some program, while you are in fact typing your response--in the middle of a word, even, you walk away from the computer. You just leave it there, running, waiting for you to talk to it. You know what will happen? The dumb little box will just keep on waiting. In fact, it will basically forget it was even talking to you, thanks to things called interrupts and context switches. The computer will sit there, patiently waiting (not that it really cares) for you to return to it, for seconds, minutes, hours, days, even years, until its moving parts start breaking down, and the hard drives fail or the fans fail and the cpu melts or the power supply commits suicide and fries the whole system.

The computer won't be calling you, or emailing you, or filing tickets on you, or setting up meetings, or finding your office, or calling you and them putting you on speakerphone with a manager. People, on the other hand, do all of those things. I don't like it. When someone wants me to take care of something, because, say, their entire team depends on me doing something for them, and then I just sort of drop what I'm doing with them and don't respond for a few days (or gasp--hours), it makes them (and their managers) really cranky. They also don't like being told no, even if this "no" stems from my desire to not f...break my teams software.

I'm not one of those programmers that wants to be locked away in a basement to program alone with only fluorescent lighting and a bag of Doritos to keep me company. However I also don't want to be regularly dealing with politics. Today I actually asked people to double check my responses before I sent them. I haven't done that since I worked at Drexel and the person I was emailing was responsible for a giant chunk of our funding. I think what I really want, is to be the only male programmer on a team of ex-model superhero female programmers (who are all capable of articulating the difference between NP-Complete and NP-Hard), working for a company whose goal is to both solve world hunger and finish the game Duke Nukem Forever. I would specialize in level design, artificial intelligence, and a few things that have nothing to do with programming. Yes. Yes I think that might be my dream job. Well, I suppose my dream job would also involve flying F-14 Tomcats, and changing the angle of the wing sweep every 5 seconds, just like I did with my toy F-14 as a child. Working with hot, brilliant female programmers is my ideal job, and I maybe never forgive our culture for the extremely low likelihood of such employment ever being within my grasp.

In other news, it turns out that I probably didn't lose %25 of my body weight. I definitely lost a lot, because I've had to keep my belt a notch tighter, which makes my pants look funny and regresses my fashion sense by about 5 years, but the scale said I was 149.2 today, so its unlikely that I lost 40 pounds in three weeks and then gained 30 in another two. Also, I don't have aids. Yeah, they actually tested for that because it is apparently not normal to get sick all of the time. I didn't tell them about the tires or my moldy sink--which I have since fixed. I don't know if you know this, but spraying chlorox on stuff and then scrubbing...I mean, wow. My sink looks at clean as it did when I moved in. I wonder if chlorox can get rid of everything I don't like. Maybe I'll take a bottle to my meeting tomorrow.