lithesomeice.com

Pushover Programming

This evening my brother confronted me about stealing his soap. Actually, he didn’t point blank accuse me of being a soap mugger. The conversation went more along the lines of something like this…

My.Brother (rather irately): ‘Ate, were you the one who took my soap?’

Me (feeling mildly guilty): ‘Yes, sorry, I was desperate… I meant to give it back…’

My.Brother (looking indignant): ‘You never bring it back. You know I have to go to work at an obscenely early hour, and i’ve had to go to work without soaping… blah blah blah… blather blather blather.’

Me (caught between the strange combination of being completely assaulted by guilt while having to fight back peals of laughter at the thought of my newly corpoRATized sibling entering his posh office without having had a proper bath, dashing off to escape his tirade): ‘Sorry, sorry, i’ll bring it back right now.’

The irony of my brother’s questionable hygienic habits of the not so distant past not lost on me during this exchange.

My sibling is infamous for his five minute non-showers, and the discussions between him and my mother on the importance of actually using shampoo on one’s hair during baths are somewhat of a legend in our home, that is when it’s not a running joke between the members of our household.

This is the reason why I’ve been so reticent about blogging again in the first place. Finding a starting point is so difficult, crafting decent sentences can be agonizing, and procrastinating can be an enjoyable thing. These, my inherent laziness coupled by a worsening case of obsessive compulsiveness, and a multitude of other reasons, can only result in an interlude which spans years.

Not that I haven’t tried numerous times to bridge the gap between my sort-off self-imposed silence and often admittedly pompous verbosity. I’ve composed countless introductions in my mind, only to discard them, or more often than not, forget them, when the ‘lull’ of coding demanded more neurons than could be spared for any dalliances of the literary sort.

If there’s one thing that has become apparent to me in the three odd years that I’ve been working in Software Development, it is that I can either indulge the struggling writer languishing in some far-off attic of my mind, or push the still infantile programmer to the limit, but I cannot be both at one time.

Survival instincts, fine tuned to a razor point, have pretty much dictated, where my focus and attention should lie. It’s pretty obvious, given the frequency (or rather, infrequency) of my blogs which of the two sides of my somewhat fractured personality I’ve been nurturing as of late. The reasons for this though deserve another blog for another time.

This is my long-winded way of admitting that having have failed to find inspiration in the profound, I’ve had no other resort but to look the other way and seek it in the absurd, which accounts for the completely irrelevant anecdote about my brother and his issues regarding my propensity for stealing soap (to his credit though, this wasn’t the first incident, nor the second, or third, so his outrage was quite valid).

The whole point of this buildup, is to allow me to express my own ire at being cornered into creating six reports at the last minute for who, in less annoying circumstances, are among my first and most favorite clients.

Now, despite the general ritual of ranting, complaining, and raving I perform before tackling additional requests for systems i’m working on, I generally don’t mind such requests as much as it may seem. Customization, after all, lies at the core of our programming principles, so additional reports and whatnots are par for the course.

Or so I tell myself, while gritting my teeth, after being entrenched in one overlapping system after another in the past three weeks which
could justify the weariness I felt in the face of such a task. After all, i’ve spent so much time in the previous weeks practically re-hauling the HARD DRUGS DATABASE SYSTEM (HDDS), and coding features hither and tither for the currently still in development MY CREW SOFT, that having to shift the already over heated gears in my head to accomodate the unexpected reports needed for the AUTOMATED EMPLOYEE EMBEZZLMENT SYSTEM (AEES) was a rather unappealing prospect.

In recent months though, i’ve developed a tenacity (or is it more of a lunacy?) which has been invaluable in situations such as these. So as I resigned myself to spending the evening i’ve alloted specifically for relaxation after having spent the last couple of nights sleeping at three in the morning, and after having come from a two hour commute client visit to update the MY CREW SOFT system, creating the six procedures needed to extract the data for the wretched reports from the various PARENT and CHILD databases of the AEES, I consoled myself with the hilarious thought that our client has no inkling as to the fact that I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing at that time when they first entrusted me to create the system which has grown to relative maturity in the last two years or so, and had had to pretty much rely on instinct in place of the experience (which I did gain eventually) needed to develop such a software. It was only my adeptness at keeping a straight face which allowed me not to betray the trepidation and horror I felt whenever they’d ask for features which I had no idea how to deliver.

And maybe this is one of the the reasons why, after all these years, and a gazillion or so system changes and requests for additional features and reports later, they’ve kept their spot in my ‘Top Ten Favorite Clients’ list. Without knowing it, they’ve watched my system grow with them, and alongside it, I as well. With their seemingly impossible demands of three years ago, they’ve started making a programmer out of me. After all, they serve the best turon i’ve ever tasted, and being the glutton that I am, food is usually all the incentive I need to secure a place for you in my heart.

Besides, all sense of pride and ego aside, i’m not ashamed to admit that it just thrills me completely when our clients use our programs and when they express delight at realizing that the reports they need are accessible with just a click of a button, and can be generated within seconds, that I would willingly (though maybe not gladly) spend as many sleepless nights as necessary organically attached to my PC to pull off whatever features and program modifications they can come up with in a moment’s notice.

Pushover Programmer, I am.