It's been a week...
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.