write.as/jonbeckett

Am I the only person that suffers from anxiety before a conference call? I had a client call at 10am this morning, and for half an hour leading up to the call, I was pretty much bricking it. It’s ridiculous really.

Whenever I go on-site somewhere new with work – particularly to run training courses – I get nervous beforehand – expecting to be “found out” by the somebody. “Why are we paying the company you work for all this money for you to be here? You’re rubbish!”. Of course these nerves are smashed as soon as I go around the room doing introductions – it’s easy to forget that I’ve been a software and web developer for over 20 years now. I do forget though. Every time.

One of the places I have visited a couple of times recently has a developer in their team. He talked the talk while chatting in-between training exercises, but when I actually saw what he had done, I got a stark reminder of the difference between “professional developers”, and “people who can code”. I’m not sure if there is a parallel you can draw with other forms of work – I suppose it’s the same difference between an accountant, and somebody that can add up a few numbers.

Sometimes while working on-site, I’ll get sucked into rat-hole conversations that expose a little of what I know. It happened last week. While talking to the girl I was working with about her iPhone, a guy stood up in his cubicle opposite us, peering over the dividing wall.

“Of course Tim Berners Lee didn’t invent the internet”

Ok. Not what we were talking about, but we’ll go with it.

“NASA invented the internet. It was NASA. Berners Lee did nothing. It was called the ARPANET”

It was one of those awkward conversations where you keep your mouth shut, because you don’t want to expose somebody as an ignorant idiot in front of their co-workers. I put my diplomatic pants on.

“Actually, I think you’ll find that the first wide area network of computers was built by DARPA – the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency – although they weren’t called that when the project started.”

He frowned.

“The ARPANET and the Internet were actually quite different from each other though, weren’t they – because ARPANET didn’t have packet switching to begin with – each of the computers had to be wired directly to each other. Packet switching – TCP/IP – was invented by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in the early 1970s and added to ARPANET – that’s where you might say the internet started. Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web in the early 1990s – maybe 20 years after the internet really began.”

He was now looking at the ceiling tiles above his head, and out of the nearby window. I turned back to the girl I was working with, who was trying not to laugh.

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“I read books.”

Anyway.

I’m now sitting back at my desk, the conference call is over, I wasn’t “found out”, and a massive sense of relief is washing over me. Time to make a celebratory cup of coffee, maybe?

For the past several months project work has been lining up in front of me like an endless snaking train. It just so happens that I have lucked into having the particular mix of skills needed for every damn project in the near future – meaning that lead times for anything involving me has stretched out into months.

Somebody with a little more power than me finally noticed this situation this week, and decided it was far more important for me to be out on the road teaching people (read: getting my foot in the door of potential future customers) than actually building anything. They also finally noticed that the rest of the developers have been avoiding learning the same stuff I do for quite some time. Guess what – those guys aren’t going to avoid it any longer.

Earlier this week I suddenly found myself notscheduled to build several things over the next few weeks, instead handing off the work to others, which was fun. I scribbled everything out in my Filofax, and wrote in lots of travel plans with “to be confirmed” noted against them instead.

I was quite looking forward to heading out on the road again. It’s not going to happen though, because it turns out everybody wants to run before they can walk. In order to train somebody on something, they kind of need that something before you arrive. Nobody thought of that.

Guess who just got shuffled back into the pack of developers for the next week, to carry on working on what he would have been working on before all the idiocy started?

After clearing the dinner things away this evening, we huddled around the TV in the living room, turned the volume up, and sat down to watch “Skull Island” together – the latest monster movie to arrive on Amazon.

I was quite possibly the biggest monster movie fanatic in the known universe when I was young. I remember crying for an entire Saturday afternoon when “Valley of Gwangi” was supposed to be on the television, and was substituted at the last minute. The BBC received hundreds of complaints from similarly upset eight to ten year olds up and down the country, and had to show it at a later date.

Of course not all monster movies are good – there are some really, reallybad ones. That’s the thing though – they’re so bad they’re good. Who remembers “The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms”, “Gorgo”, and “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” ?

When I was young my Mum earned extra money cleaning my grandparents house in the week. During the summer holidays myself and my brother would tag along with her, and find things to do around the house during the day. This invariably included a diet of old TV shows such as “The Monkees”, “Champion the Wonder Horse”, and “Chopper Squad”. Sometimes you would strike gold though – sometimes a Godzilla movie would be shown. Everything stopped for Godzilla.

When you’re eight or nine years old, it’s not a guy in a rubber suit stomping on carboard houses – it’s a 300ft tall monster crushing houses and factories while doing battle with Mecha-Godzilla, and Titanosaurus. I can still remember the advent of video cassette recorders, and begging my Dad to hire out Godzilla movies for the weekend.

Anyway. Getting sidetracked.

We sat down to watch “Skull Island” tonight. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Sure, the plot is paper thin, and sure, it’s entirely predictable, but it’s a Monster Movie. A proper pop-corn munching monster movie like the ones I watched when I was young. Who’s not going to enjoy seeing Samuel L Jackson playing a deranged Army colonel, intent on destroying King Kong, or Brie Larson (future Captain Marvel btw) actually getting to be a relevant bad-ass character rather than a damsel in distress ?

Let’s just say I liked “Skull Island” a lot. It starts to fit the story together that started with Godzilla a couple of years ago, and sets up the movies we know are coming over the next few years – “King of Monsters”, and “Godzilla vs King Kong”. I’ll get my popcorn order in right now.

Well this is an unexpected turn of events. If you arrived here via an email I sent you, or a blog post you read elsewhere, you’ve just learned that I upped sticks from where I used to write, and have begun writing here instead. If you’ve seen me do this before, you’re probably rolling your eyes, and getting ready to delete me from your bookmarks or feed aggregator, because you’ve had enough. Let’s get straight to it – why did I move the blog (again) ? Because the previous one had slowly but surely descended into a vanilla load of rubbish about nothing at all. Don’t get me wrong – the blog will still be about nothing at all – I’m good at nothing at all – but it will be a little less vanilla. Oh, and I won’t be attaching stock photos to the start of every post either. I’m still not entirely sure why I started doing that.

I guess the major reason I’m moving back to an “anonymous” blog, is because I’ve never been entirely comfortable with work and extended family reading my posts. We’ve all been there – we’ve all had some nosy parker from the other end of the building read our blog. We’ve also had an email from either our parents, or a distant relative, unhappy with something we’ve written – no matter how innocuous it might have been. It’s not that I’m worried about writing anything incendiary – it’s more that I don’t want to have to deal with those people any more. Does that make sense ?

I just want to write.

In what could easily be described as a fantastically stupidthing to do, this morning I created both a Facebook Page, and a Google+ “Collection” for this blog. I also switched on “Sharing” features within the mighty Wordpress for the first time. What did this mean? It meant Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and Twitter began to be automagically polluted with links to my inane words, thoughts, ideas, and stories.

Being honest, I’ve always been torn about promoting the junk I write. I suppose I’ve always thought there was value to quietly posting thoughts to a corner of the internet, and people stumbling upon them through serendipity rather than any breadcrumb trails or signposts.

Maybe I’m wrong.

It’s not like I write anything earth shatteringly interesting. Not any more. The kids have grown up now, so their stories have become their own. In recent times I have written about travelling around the country, and the strangers I crossed paths with along the way. I’m careful never to talk about work, and not to judge people too harshly – I would perhaps volunteer that I am the world champion at sitting on fences when there’s an argument to be had.

It occurs to me that I’ve been writing about nothing in particular for nearly fifteen years now. I could self-publish the most unsuccessful series of e-books ever seen on the Amazon book store. Fifteen volumes of forgettable nonsense about nothing in particular. Maybe that should be the title, or strap-line – “forgettable nonsense about nothing in particular”.

Anyway – I’ve switched the sharing stuff back off now – back to my safe little quiet corner of the internet. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I’m back in the office today. Currently taking a break, writing things into the Filofax, and comparing calendars between home, and work – figuring out what I’m going to miss over the next few weeks if everything happens as planned in a meeting this morning. Who am I kidding? Things never work out as planned, but I’ll make a mess of the calendar section of my Filofax with it all anyway. Maybe I should start writing in pencil?

I’m going to be on the road a lot this summer. I’ll be writing from trains, planes, and lecture theatres – sharing my daily adventures while pretending to sound clever – standing in front of strangers, pointing at projected screens, and boring them to death.

I think I like teaching better than developing – it’s less stressful. I guess it’s worth remembering that I teach grown-ups – I can’t imagine how much more difficult it is to teach teenagers.

When you’re working on a software development project, you’re nearly always up against it – fighting to deliver something that works, that is invariably better than the design specification, and in less time than was estimated. When you’re lecturing a room full of business people you just turn up, bounce around the room enthusiastically for a few days, and go away – there is no end product.

I know lots of teachers. They would be running at me with sharp implements if they read this, because the end product of teaching is of course an educated pupil, armed to go forward with the new tools you have provided them. Here’s the thing though – a classroom pupil doesn’t start screaming on the final day “I’m not paying because I’m no good at this stuff”, or “I’m not paying until next year, because I won’t be using any of this until then” (and by then, they will have forgotten it all, or moved jobs).

I sometimes wonder why I have ended up being “the teacher” among the group of developers I know. Logic would dictate that I’m either better with people, or worse with programming. Or maybe I’m good at both, but being good with people is more useful until you’ve built a relationship with a client? I don’t know.

Of course all these plans could change within a couple of days. I’ll end up setting fire to the Filofax, and questioning the nature of the universe. Imagine if you tried to tell an Amazon Echo “Remind me that I’m travelling all over the place in a few weeks time – not sure when or where yet though”.

I have been quietly struggling with “blogging” for months, and resisting the temptation to write about about it, because who wants to read a blog post about blogging? Then I remind myself that I’m not here to write what others want to read – I’m here to empty my head, and if anybody at all finds it even remotely interesting, that’s a bonus.

Late yesterday evening I looked at all of the popular (and not so popular) blogging platforms – among them Blogger, Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, Postachio, Ghost, and more – eventually questioning why on earth I was doing it. I read through old posts where I had argued against the perceived “walled gardens”, and both agreed and disagreed with myself. I ended up laughing at my ability to sit on the fence of disagreements with myself.

There is a temptation to build my own little island in the internet, and invite people to come and find me. I think of it as the “fool on the hill” model. This flies in the face of the wannabe famous bloggers that pepper BlogLovin with inspirational photos of clothes they have bought, and food they were about to eat – each a marketing machine in their own right, plastering their grinning photogenic faces across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Sometimes I think playing the game might be fun – selling out to attract attention, rather than just carry on emptying my head. Then I reconsider, and figure there is value in being discovered by chance, rather than by force. I’m sure internet marketing morons would disagree with me. There’s also the whole love/hate thing with attention. Sure, it’s nice when somebody reads something you have written and comments on it, but then there’s the whole problem of WHO is reading your words. I’m quite happy with strangers reading, but not so happy with co-workers, friends, family, or real world acquaintances digging through every damn post I’ve ever written. It’s worth noting that I know some of them already have.

I’ve written about all this rubbish before. I won’t change. I never change. I’ll still be here, recording thoughts, and daily adventures in another ten years time. I’ll still be wondering if it’s a good idea, and wondering where everybody I used to read has gone. I’ll occasionally complain about this or that, but I’ll carry on, because I’m a bit stupid like that.

It started like any other Saturday. I woke at about 7:30, gazed at the ceiling for a while, checked my phone, then eventually wandered downstairs to have a shower at about 8. After the shower I made a cup of tea, and smiled at Miss 12 who was already up, and had been for some time. She has been invited to a movie night with a friend tonight, so got up at 7, had a shower, washed her hair, and already had her favourite clothes on – before breakfast time.

While heading through the kitchen to make breakfast, I noticed the cats had already been fed. I smiled and retrieved bacon from the fridge to make breakfast for everybody.

Half an hour later Miss 13 had finished breakfast and retreated back to her bedroom to continue watching YouTube. I was folding clothes in the lounge when she began shouting something. My other half rolled her eyes.

“Go and see what she wants.”

I walk to the bottom of the stairs and shout.

“What’s up?”

“The cat is meowing. Fetch mum.”

I wander back to the lounge and tell my other half. She sighs, and stomps off towards the stairs with a cup of tea in her hand. Twenty seconds later I hear her voice shout for me, with a very different tone.

By the time I got to the top of the stairs she is half dressed from her pyjamas, and I notice one of our cats lying on his side in the children’s bedoom door, mouth wide open, struggling for breath, and meowing occasionally – or rather “yowling”, if that makes any sense.

Without being asked I climbed into the loft, and fetched the cat box down, and lined it with the newspaper I picked up on my way home a couple of nights before. Half a minute later we were in the car, pulling out of the drive. Two of the children had slipped shoes on too, and were along for the ride – Miss 13 still in her pyjamas.

While my other half parked the car, I carried the cat straight into the local vet, and explained what we knew so far. I have to give them their credit – they immediately stopped all appointments, and rushed the cat through. I sat quietly, making conversation with other people in the waiting room until my other half appeared, and we were finally invited in to talk with the vet.

She tried to sugar coat it for the children, and sound hopeful, but you could read everything in her face. She chose her words very slowly, and very carefully. It must be one of the most difficult things a vet has to do.

“Given the symptoms he is presenting, we suspect he is either suffering heart failure, or the effects of lung disease. Both can present in the same way – or not at all sometimes – but we won’t know until we can calm him down. We have fashioned him an oxygen tent next door, and will give him half an hour to see if we can oxygenate, and stabilize him. The best chance to diagnose properly would be at the animal hospital, but unless he improves, he may well not survive the journey”.

We sat for half an hour at the back of the vets while the assistant made observations every few minutes. His heart rate and breathing were all over the place. I walked out the back and called our eldest daughter – telling her what we knew, and invited her to come see him. I didn’t sugar coat any of it – warning her “this may well be goodbye”.

She arrived ten minutes later.

Ten minutes after that the vet re-appeared, and we made our decision together. Until that moment the children had been pretty stoic. Miss 13 fell to pieces first, and buried her face in her Mum, sobbing uncontrollably. As they began prepping to put the cat to sleep, I asked each of the children if they wanted to stay, or go. Miss 12 wanted to go. So did Miss 13. Once we got outside, they both hung on to me and fell apart. I looked up, and struggled to think of something to do or say.

“Don’t be sad – you have to remember all the fantastic things about him – not just the last hour. Remember when he was little, and he had huge ears and big long legs? Remember all the times he stole food off the counter? Remember all those mice and birds he ate the heads off? What about that time he broke into Miss 16’s room to try and eat the fish while their tank was being cleaned? Or when he sat on your lap for a fuss, and dug his claws into your legs? Or how we would sprint into the house, before slowling to a nonchalant walk before entering the lounge?”. Both girls burst out laughing. Within moments they were recalling their own funny memories of things he had done.

A few minutes later my other half appeared, along with Miss 16, and the vet. She thanked everybody for being so brave. It must be so hard to make judgement calls on the life or death of an animal. We walked quietly off to the car, this time with an empty cat box, and made our way home.

Rest in Peace little one. You were one of three brothers, the last of a litter. We had three daughters, and three chickens. We had to buy three cats. Now we have two. You will live on in our memories as all pets with a character tend to. The girls will probably tell stories about your antics to their children one day.

“We had this ginger cat called Tom…”

I don’t think “drained” is really the right word – “empty” might be a better word. Half an hour before leaving the client site yesterday the code was in pieces. The entire production system was down. Half an hour later I left the building, and began running the mile across the city to the railway station. I fixed it.

Somewhere in the region of twenty five thousand lines of programming, and the most complex part of the whole damn thing had been harbouring a bug since the project first started. I was relieved, but wiped out.

Ever tried to run a mile with a heavy backpack and a suitcase? I hadn’t until yesterday. I found my seat on the train, slumped down, and felt the trickle of sweat start to pour from my hair, down my neck. I sat for ten or fifteen minutes, perfectly still, waiting for my body to cool back down.

The journey home took four hours, door to door.

Today was more of the same – thrown into somebody elses project to deliver a raft of changes. Imagine picking up a novel written by somebody else, and being told to write the last chapter without having read the rest of it.

I’m hoping the weekend has nothing in store for me. I need to rest.

I have been sitting in my hotel room for the last two hours, mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a succession of news websites in search of something – anything – to peak my interest. All the while I am resisting the temptation to bust out a code editor and carry on working into the early hours on the commercial project I am here for. They haven’t paid me to do it, but I can see what their project could be if I put just a little more work into it.

Every so often the Amazon tablet I bought myself for Christmas a couple of years ago chirps in the corner of the room – notifications of some sort or another. I should really switch it to silent, or aeroplane mode to shut it up.

My feet ache. I should have taken my shoes off when I got in from the restaurant earlier, but for some reason have not. The shoes are right there – on the end of my legs, but somehow I haven’t managed to get around to unlacing them and kicking them across the floor yet.

Ah, the restaurant. I went out for a hot meal tonight, on account of the persistently miserable weather. It’s worth noting that the rain and wind destroyed the umbrella I bought yesterday morning. It put up a good fight, but a freak gust of wind on a busy road intersection didn’t so much turn it inside out, as munch it up like a tangled spaghetti of coat-hangers. I swore. Lots. And got wet.

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you will know there is a pizza restaurant around the corner from the hotel. It’s part of a very large chain of pizza restaurants that crop up in most big towns and cities here, selling fake Italian sounding food that’s probably sold to franchisees from an industrial unit near London somewhere. I somehow managed to buy a main, a drink, and a pudding and pay just under the allowance given by the company I work for while working away.

I still hate sitting alone in restaurants – especially when they are busy. Two pretty girls sat just across from me, deep in conversation about whichever Netflix shows they happened to be watching at the moment. Behind me a group of fifty-somethings chatted about how funny it was that one of them had arrived late. It really was that boring. I ate my food, drank my drink, paid the waitress, and wandered back.

I travel home tomorrow afternoon. I have tickets for a train a little after 4pm. Friday morning will be filled with paperwork and email. The weekend will be filled with chores. Next week will be filled with continued headbutting of the laptop – but at least I’ll be able to make a sandwich in the kitchen, pour myself a coffee when I want, and sit in the lounge talking absolute rubbish with my children. It’s surprising how quickly you miss the rubbish.