Tag Archives: Time

Snow’s Return

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Snow drifts lazily to the ground outside, lit sodium orange in the glare of streetlights and the lit-up logo of the self-storage place across the dual carriageway.  It settles briefly, knowing all too well that the breeze off the ocean will melt it away before morning.

Somewhere a radio is playing; frequency-modulated static over the sleepy drawl of a late-night DJ and the songs of decades long gone.  Nothing stirs in the house, just me and the tap-tap-tap of fingers on keys.

It is a moment outside time in a place adrift from the world.

But tomorrow the streets will be clear and the dance will begin again, leaving only the trickles of snow that linger in shadows and the endless radio haze.

 

Snow settling, almost visible

Adrift in Time

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As Mark pointed out to me, it’s probably rather strange to pick for your Best Man someone who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left university, it’s easily overruled by the rest.

I mean, graduation was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.

In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but seeing someone once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t register in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.

To my shame I’ve spoken to those University friends less and less as time has gone on. The majority I don’t even regularly IM anymore — we’ve become Twitter friends, Facebook friends, people who comment on each others’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talking to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for contact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Normally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but sometimes it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.

So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But having isolated the cause of that as my own reluctance to start instant messenger chats, at least I have something I can work on.

My Longest-Running Bug

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In March 2007, a long-running project that I was working on was drawing to a close.  A much busier colleague of mine was struggling with his workload, and since I wasn’t too busy, he passed a simple job on to me.  That job was to build a software emulator for a bit of hardware they’d built.  All it had to do was make up some fake data and spit it out over TCP/IP, and I reckoned I could do it in a few days, maybe a week tops.

Barely two days later, that project was having some issues with the real hardware, and drafted me in to help test it.  I tested, and I learned, and I started going to their project meetings, starting writing documentation, started coding on their main software.  My poor emulator fell by the wayside, superseded by more important things.

That day was 3 years, 4 months and 20 days ago.

In that time we’ve been through a dozen team members, three project managers, four business reshuffles, two companies and two customers.  Our equipment has been installed at three different sites, and I’ve racked up 25,000 air miles.  I’ve worked on eight other projects. I’ve eaten a hundred lunches in the sun on the arm of Portland Harbour, and dashed there in the rain a hundred more.  I have given orders to warships, and taken tea with Captains, and I have watched the sun set over Iraq.

And today, at long last, I think I’ve finished that emulator.

This quick software job is done; this issue is being closed, maybe forever.  This issue that, though my brain seems reluctant to accept it, is older than my son.

“A few days, maybe a week tops”.