J.P.

I like writing code. It comes with the territory when you’re a big geek as I am. I’ve been called a “propeller head” in an endearing way by folks that I work with. Perhaps for Halloween I’ll wear one of those propeller hats and make neener neener neener noises. I don’t know what one has to do with the other but it’s always fun to make an odd sound. It’s better than an odd smell.

I have very few regrets in life but one thing that I wish I had done was to get through the computer classes I started when I went to college right out of high school. At 18 I thought I knew it all and I felt rather insulted that I had to start from square one when it came to computer courses, even though my high school had a rather progressive computer education program for it’s time and I had been using computers for several years before going to college after high school. (I make this distinction because I went to college twice during my life). As the professor of that first class showed us what a computer was and where the power button was and how the keyboard worked, I took it all as another sign that I was completely different from everyone else that was closely paying attention to his dreck and that I knew I was going to be bored out of my mind by the second week of the semester. I asked about a computer class placement test so I could prove myself to be worthy of something more than writing…


10 CLS
20 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
30 END


… for my first project, but the professor said that everyone had to start at the beginning (he didn’t sing “a very good place to start!”, which was a shame, now that I look back on the whole ordeal). Since I thought I had better things to do with my time, I dropped the course. I hear that by the end of the course students were expected to build a program that acted as a calculator, complete with memory registers. I never understood why we programmed a computer to do something that had already been accomplished by a device that was specific to that purpose. Seems like a waste of time.

The reason I look back and think that I should have stuck it out was because I would have learned patience and discipline a lot sooner than I ended up doing and I might have built a better foundation of fundamentals when it came to writing code. I have to admit that I’m a big of a renegade when it comes to doing what I love. Who knows, perhaps I’d have a degree in computer science instead of just a ton of experience under my belt. Some employers look at these things and weigh those letters next to a name quite heavily.

All I know is that I still enjoy writing code as much as I did when I wrote my first program in 1982 on one of the six Apple ][+ computers in high school. It was a cash register program that tracked inventory, printed receipts and accurately computed tax and change. Hey that was big stuff for 1982. I probably enjoy writing code even more these days, because it seems like the possibilities are endless when it comes to technology. I like seeing a user’s face light up when they accomplish something using a program that I wrote. I love the challenge of taking a corporate bureaucratic procedure and smoothing it out with just the addition of some bits and bytes. That’s wicked cool to me, and if someone were to ask me what I wanted to do for the rest of my life (as far as employment goes), I’d tell them that I’d be quite content in my dimly lit office writing code and making a user think that technology is awesome. Because it is.

I’m thinking about this stuff today because yesterday my group at work was told about some leadership changes (meaning my manager was let go, along with a couple of others in the organization, as part of some master plan). I don’t know where I’m going to be on the totem pole right now. I still have a job and I’ve had a couple of people tell me that “they’ve got my back” (and I have theirs) but it’s hard to be excited about working when someone that you significantly admire and respect is no longer on your team.

I just have to remember my love for writing code and solving the challenges presented to me. Losing myself in that avenue of productivity is where I can still smile.

I walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts near work today for my usual lunch hour routine. There have been several new additions to the staff of this particular store, but for the most part it is populated with the usual folk behind the counter. I made a pit stop in the wash room and then went to the counter to order my usual large, unsweetened iced tea with lemon. The girl that is the most attentive to my needs was working behind the counter.

Ok, now here’s a couple of things that tell me that working from home has distracted from my relationship with the Dunkin’ Donuts folks.

1. The girl behind the counter is now quite pregnant. I don’t know where that came from. Well, I know where it came from but how did it happen so quickly? Well, they probably hope it didn’t happen quickly, especially that night, because quick isn’t always good, but you know what I mean.

2. No one behind the corner could recall my order from memory. They knew it had something to do with iced tea but there was a controversy with lemon participation.

3. No one noticed my lack of facial hair.

This is my tragedy of the moment.

On the bright side, I refrained from offering congratulations on the girl’s pregnancy because sometimes the bump in the belly isn’t a baby but just an overindulgence of whoppers or something and I don’t want to repeat the mistake I made way back in 1990 when I congratulated a woman who wasn’t pregnant but instead had enjoyed too many large sandwiches from Papa Gino’s.

My dad had the habit of calling me up and starting the conversation with a complete random fact from days gone by.  I would answer the phone, “Hello?” and he would say something like, “Remember the time we were loading hay in the Four Story and your mother got caught in the manure and fell down when she forgot to let go of the hay bale when she threw it on the elevator?”

Yeah, he was funny like that.  He always referred to mom, who, of course, was his wife at the time, as “Your Mother”. The best part of these conversations is that I have completely and unabashedly inherited his memory for crazy details and the like. I could totally relate. And god help me, I can see me calling people up and having a similar conversation when I get old. 

I was thinking about this whole thing this morning as I was out for my pre-sunrise walk. As I trucked my body up the steep hill that our road winds up, all of a sudden I had a flash of memory of being in fifth grade and thinking I was so smart because I figured out why two classrooms in our elementary school had two doors instead of one. I don’t know why this random factoid popped into my head but there it was. By the way, said rooms were Rooms 209 and 211, which used to be part of the high school. The part of the room with a “back door” used to be a separate departmental chair office. And that’s why they had a separate light switch and extra clocks in the store room.)

Yep, complete geek even in elementary school.

Anyways, remembering this made me a little sad because I miss those random facts from my father and when I remember this sort of thing, I have no one to confirm these facts with.  I guess the fact that I even remember these sort of things means that he’s still hanging around somehow.

Earl is in Memphis for the week for work-related stuff. He left very early on Monday morning and is scheduled to return on Thursday evening.

Even though we have been doing this sort of thing for over 16 years, there is a large part of me that will never get used to not having my husband around for days on end. It’s a necessary part of his job, and undoubtedly I’ll be traveling for work next year, so I get that it just comes with the territory. But with that being said, I’ll never get used to it.

Thank goodness for technology. We can Skype and text and talk and chat, but only during his breaks!

Le sigh.