Returning To London

I woke half an hour before the 6am alarm clock this morning, and lay staring at the ceiling for the next half hour “ playing through the day ahead in my mind. An important meeting with a client in London lay several hours ahead “ a chance to show what I’ve been picking away at for the last several weeks, and a chance for the client to see what they have bought. It was my first trip back to London for a little while, and I was looking forward to it in a strange way. Although my two years subcontracting in the city had their ups and downs, I’ve come to realise that although the days were incredibly long (4 hours travel every day!), the time spent on trains was my time. Time to read books, write in my notebook, and think about things. Of course there were also the myriad annoyances of travelling along with the commuting masses, but memory has a wonderful way of only recalling the good bits. Prior to the meeting (which I can of course write nothing about) we found a nearby cafe, bought a coffee, and tried to make each other laugh. Unfortunately this resulted in my suggestion that we should kick off the meeting with a guitar backed song “ if only we had brought a guitar! (you know I’m joking, right?). While wandering from cafe to destination, the project manager remarked on how relaxed I appeared to be. Both myself and a colleague responded with the same thing “ it was too late to be stressed. Our stress happened over the weeks leading up to today “ the hours of headbanging, cursing at the desktop computer, swearing at the database server, stomping away from our desk in mock disgust the hard work was already done. Next time you’re using a piece of software that does something remotely clever, and “just works”, think about that “ remember that somebody somewhere sweated over the feature you take for granted. Somebody somewhere stressed over it, worried about how to make it work, how to make it look, and probably did so against a budget and a timescale that were not of their own choosing. For some reason I’m reminded of Louis CK’s speech about everything being great, and nobody is happy. He mentions people complaining when the internet doesn’t work on long haul plane flights, and passengers bitching about it. His response always makes me smile “What are you complaining about? You’re sitting in a chair in the SKY!”