A windowbar into my soul

During my career I have been many things: Phone answering service, programmer, guru, idiot, scapegoat, the guy who drank all the coffee. It is not frequent that I am accused of sharing my inner thoughts, except when I forget to put the conference call on mute when saying "pfffft!".

Rarely do you get a glimpse into the soul of another human being than when they are creative. For example, many people look at "Voice of Fire" and say it captures the essence of Enron.

I know this all too well. I do some acting, directing, and on occasion, writing for the Church that I attend. I am hardly nervous with acting, I have slight anxiety when I'm directing, and full Grand Mal Seizures when something I've written is preformed.

It's because I can't hide behind the director or the script as I can when you don't like my acting or direction. If people like my writing, then they like me. I would rather play patty-cake with a cheese grater than have my work disliked.

Thankfully most of my artistic creations in my day job consist of spreadsheets or instructional pages. It is hard to feel hurt when someone doesn't like your email. It's not my problem they don't know how to read sarcasm in my emoticons or plain html.

|:-(.

(that's Bert about to go to the doctor to have that mole looked at)

Except when I'm programming.

I am a notoriously sloppy programmer. I am the only one I know who could make a Gordian knot out of spaghetti code.

Couple it with the usual project planning which has the predictability of a texting driver and you end up with 'artifacts' that reveal my secret names for parts of a program.

I worked on one large redesign which had me program about 25 forms in MS Access 97. For the less geeky that is akin to running the Iditarod with a lone, maladroit chihuahua.

It was a phased release, which is fancy talk for we didn't complete it, we just debugged it until we gave up. Each time I went to the clients I would be surprised at what they could find. Who knew you could insert a colon into a button. I've heard it happening the other way round though...

Then one day someone turned to me in testing and said

Them: "What is bigfreakinform?"
Me: "Huh?"
Them: "bigfreakinform. It says it right there."
Me: "Gee, it was supposed to say 'Good morning'. I'll get around to that."

And for the next 4 years that form which truly WAS a big freaking form held it's name. A small windowbar into my soul. From then on I tried to limit the use of cuss words in my naming of modules.