Dog Days At Work, Fame in School and Other Stories.

We first talk tonight about work and how we're saddled with more of it more often.

I, of course, work at a secretive facility management software firm that has office presence in four countries, coding effort in two locations, one coding platform and 2.7341 layers of products. I, of course, am in no mood to spread more corporate propaganda at this of all places, so won't expand on what we mean by "facility management", except to mention that I'm part of the product development team, studiously developing some additional, so far unadvertised, modules to version 4.0 of our flagship product. I prefer to think of my contributions as being delectable, subtle, and yet, profound.

Unfortunately, so does my project lead.

So, in addition to this laying of subtle easter eggs to the system, I've also been fixing bugs in some legacy deployments in Australia, and will be scripting some wild SQL poetry to the db tomorrow. The first shot, so to speak, will be fired this Thursday, when we'll unviel and deploy the module I'm working on to our first bakra-client (bakra == sacrificial goat in Hindi slang), a towering giant in Singapore's crowded civil-engineering skyline. The fun part, of course, is that this would mean that my code is, in essence, running software on both sides of a major throughfare near Orchard Road; my old company, where I did my internship, is just across the road from these guys. The bad part is, I'll probably have to clock in 12 hours for the next two days at the least; there's loads of work left to be done, and at this point, am treading personally unchartered waters. Between you and me, I've already given up on perfection at this point; I just hope the code passes initial screening successfully, we could always solve deeper bugs at leisure. Although, there's this part of me that thinks, in fact, knows, I did some good work on this; it *has* to work at least for the effort, don't you think?

Okay, this officially is becoming spooky now, but I seem to be extremely well-known among juniors, alas frustratingly enough, among junior female students it appears, from my old school in Hyderabad. This has happened often enough to see a clear, propaganda-istic pattern - I suspect a couple of my old teachers have been brainwashing gullible kids for their own ideological purposes - but is, nevertheless, also excruciatingly tantalising for some very obvious reasons: not only do I feel cut-off from my old social network, but also, heck, all these girls who fawn at me are virtually toddlers! None of them, I repeat, NONE of them, are of a date-able age! This, and my clear lack of dating options for the forseeable future, have convinced me that, clearly, THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD in these matters.

On other news, William Darymple, to whom I said yesterday I wrote a quick congratulatory email, has replied. Nothing of essence in the reply, mind you, just amusing to see that my mail didn't automatically go into the spam folder, and that, now that I've opened a channel of communication, there are a few things I wouldn't mind emailing him about later. Let's see.

I'm also keeping an eye open for shifting industries lately; nothing pucca as yet, but am increasingly concerned that my amazing powers of critical analysis and verbal exposition could, perhaps, be under-utilised in a coding-only job. The carrot at the current company, though, is that we're apparently looking at re-inventing ourselves as less of a software company and more of a software-sales company, but between you and me, I'd like nothing better than a decently paying job which gives free junkets to Europe (and NYC; there are many these days who would take pains to point out NYC's inherently European leaning), an unending supply of iced mocha, and some space to do some "real" thinking that I so cherish. In particular, Barclays Singapore is hiring, and couldn't help wonder if I could send them something, along with this other packet I may or may not be sending to McKinsey. These, of course, are idle sleep-time thoughts and in no way constitute actual intentions or decisions; still love my job, but it's good to keep a feel on the job market as well.

As a parting shot, one of my favourite sites on the Net. Its simplicity still befuddles me.