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memories of having remembered
Thursday, February 25 1999
I found myself blowing a good part of the work day hopelessly trying to debug a script for which I'd left "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT" in effect. I guess it just goes to show I'm still just a pot-smoking hacker at heart. I get to the point where I think I'm an ASP expert and then something like this comes up to thoroughly demoralize me and prove how superficial my experience really is. Still, I'm doing very well considering how I just dived into this profession without knowing whether I could even do it.
There's this new guy at work named Marty. He's a Windows expert, about 40 years old, and he's cleaning house in the web development department. No longer will we be a bunch of cowboys writing code. We're going to standardize our variable names, we're going to learn to indent consistently, and we'll begin using source safe. I worry a little that this guy's rigid ideas might stifle my creativity, but at the same time, it's also good to see less hopeless chaos and a real push towards reliability and consistency. Given any rules, I can be creative. In my experience, creativity is always about pushing the limits within a set of rules, and those rules can be terribly restrictive. Remember Mondrian, the guy who only painted in vertical and horizontal lines? Come to think of it, his paintings were pretty much crap. But I think of them often, so there's something there.
At the end of the day, I had my mind-bogglingly complex code up and running. The satisfaction was not enough, however, for me to justify going to a free movie screening tonight. I went home and took a bath instead.
Today I wondered for a moment what it would be like just to get up and leave all this stuff behind and head off on the road, on my own. I wondered what Kim would do, and what my colleagues and coaches would say at work when a few days passed and I never turned up. It gave me a wicked satisfaction to see their hurt and confusion in my mind's eye. I've always had a sadistic streak in me that sought to cause undeserved pain to people in my life. I remember it being there when I was very young. There's a scene in my early childhood where I refused a comic book just to cause my mother consternation. Through all the fog of my memories, though, it's hard to say whether this incident really happened. I think we remember a lot of things as memories of having remembered something; it's an inherently error-prone process.
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