Sometimes in your life, you meet new people whom you know. Yes they are complete strangers but you know them because either they are an exact replica, future projections or a flashback of someone you know well. The likeness/similarities that i mention here are not of physical attributes, but in the person. In a rare case this person who you know the one the stranger is, emulating is yourself!!. Recently I met someone who was a crystal ball view of my future. But as I said before we were in noway physically alike, let me go ahead and describe him and then our interaction so those who know me would see how different and same we are.
In a recent customer visit to a company in North California i met Jeff. The first time he came into my field of vision, it was a figure of slowly moving fiftyish man with dry skin of caucasian complexion and receding blonde hair. He came over sat beside me greeted me buoyantly. He was the local SCM guy, his job was to provide me with a view of their build, on which i would run my software to detect programming errors. He started to show me around the build environment, the typing being slow and with a lot of typos. At first it seemed that he was out of place away from his workstation but a careful observation brought out accessibility issue with his left eye. Over the huge heap of clearcase scripts and commands he kept forgetting the the switches, script names, commands etc. My brain was focusing on the bringing out the best impression on the customer, but it was one of those days the things wouldn't just not go well. We ran into an integration issue just as we began, that took a while to solve. A fiesty good looking (she must have been downright hot!! in her days) tools administrator started giving me a hard time, laying me over why was it taking so long time, weather i has using a hack to make it work blah blah.... While Jeff and me were trying to solve the make integration issue, i heard her voice "Jeff you have sitting here for a while now you might get low blood sugar, come lets go and have something". Jeff looked at me and said i better go and eat something otherwise she will get concerned. All these things about Jeff were like a points a of some pattern i knew. Then when he waved his muscular dry arm at me wham!! it was clear, they had the signature puncture marks of a very fine needle insulin injecting Type I Diabetes (IDDM) patients. I confirmed my readings with a quick comparison with marks on my own arm. All the symptops he was suffering from i had read in every literature regarding Type 1 diabetes. That is what happen to patients in the long run. That is what it was going to happen to me.
Over the peiod of the trial we interacted a more and found a lot of similarities. The common wanderlust showed up in his stories of London and Germany, while I added my bit of Ladakh and Goa. His modus operandi of manhood was marathons and mine was motorcycling. Both thought the endocrinologists did not know what they are talking about, both of had been before and in future are open for research drug testing. Both of had been sometimes delinquent about our dietary restrictions. Both of us had sometime in our life when we seriously thought of giving up software and doing social work, both of us had stupidly had returned our minds to software.
But with this growing list of similarities came a slow growing fear within me. Is this going to be my future? It was obvious that he had been tucked away with mundane job of a SCM build engineer, due to his disabilities. Usually he was coping with them quite fine, but sometime when his retinopathy hypoglycemia and fading memory would hit at the same time his had would stare at the keyboard trying piece the things in his mind and look for the alphabets on the monitor. It broke your heart to see that. The day passed slowly with my tool dragging me all long the trial. Jeff took me to his cubicle so that we could work from there in a quieter environment. There was miniature Trans-America building model made of the empty insulin bottles and blood sugar test strip containers. He pointed out and said my son made that. Surely he was more at his element in this workstation showing off all the quick aliases and shortcuts to do big jobs at a keystroke. He was almost a master of the csh, so much so that at least i remember twice engineers popping up and asking Jeff for some csh shortcut, he would squeeze shut his eyes touch his forehead and come with wired keystrokes to do the job.
Finally the tool worked i had now a list of errors to show off to them. Maybe it was the working of the tool i was not so sad i was before. Jeff seemed to be happy with his life. Was it reconciliation or happiness ?, i don't know but i chose happiness. While i was discussing the memory errors with the architect there i stated our mandatory inquiry if they used an advanced memory pool mechanism of their own, for which the tool had to be tuned. The architect answered "No the current version does not have it , but Jeff has been designing a very optimal pool, i am going to push it in this year". I saw Jeff with very raised eyebrows and new appreciation, his response began with "I did it in my free time" and continued to the implementation detail of the pool.
With the days work done and the my heart back to former state of optimism i got up to take leave, just then the good looking tools admin came in again "Jeff we have to leave now, I have to pick Tom ". Jeff in his booming voice said, "My wifes here, time to go home. bye buddy". My lips had grown into a full stretch of a huge smile by then.
In a recent customer visit to a company in North California i met Jeff. The first time he came into my field of vision, it was a figure of slowly moving fiftyish man with dry skin of caucasian complexion and receding blonde hair. He came over sat beside me greeted me buoyantly. He was the local SCM guy, his job was to provide me with a view of their build, on which i would run my software to detect programming errors. He started to show me around the build environment, the typing being slow and with a lot of typos. At first it seemed that he was out of place away from his workstation but a careful observation brought out accessibility issue with his left eye. Over the huge heap of clearcase scripts and commands he kept forgetting the the switches, script names, commands etc. My brain was focusing on the bringing out the best impression on the customer, but it was one of those days the things wouldn't just not go well. We ran into an integration issue just as we began, that took a while to solve. A fiesty good looking (she must have been downright hot!! in her days) tools administrator started giving me a hard time, laying me over why was it taking so long time, weather i has using a hack to make it work blah blah.... While Jeff and me were trying to solve the make integration issue, i heard her voice "Jeff you have sitting here for a while now you might get low blood sugar, come lets go and have something". Jeff looked at me and said i better go and eat something otherwise she will get concerned. All these things about Jeff were like a points a of some pattern i knew. Then when he waved his muscular dry arm at me wham!! it was clear, they had the signature puncture marks of a very fine needle insulin injecting Type I Diabetes (IDDM) patients. I confirmed my readings with a quick comparison with marks on my own arm. All the symptops he was suffering from i had read in every literature regarding Type 1 diabetes. That is what happen to patients in the long run. That is what it was going to happen to me.
Over the peiod of the trial we interacted a more and found a lot of similarities. The common wanderlust showed up in his stories of London and Germany, while I added my bit of Ladakh and Goa. His modus operandi of manhood was marathons and mine was motorcycling. Both thought the endocrinologists did not know what they are talking about, both of had been before and in future are open for research drug testing. Both of had been sometimes delinquent about our dietary restrictions. Both of us had sometime in our life when we seriously thought of giving up software and doing social work, both of us had stupidly had returned our minds to software.
But with this growing list of similarities came a slow growing fear within me. Is this going to be my future? It was obvious that he had been tucked away with mundane job of a SCM build engineer, due to his disabilities. Usually he was coping with them quite fine, but sometime when his retinopathy hypoglycemia and fading memory would hit at the same time his had would stare at the keyboard trying piece the things in his mind and look for the alphabets on the monitor. It broke your heart to see that. The day passed slowly with my tool dragging me all long the trial. Jeff took me to his cubicle so that we could work from there in a quieter environment. There was miniature Trans-America building model made of the empty insulin bottles and blood sugar test strip containers. He pointed out and said my son made that. Surely he was more at his element in this workstation showing off all the quick aliases and shortcuts to do big jobs at a keystroke. He was almost a master of the csh, so much so that at least i remember twice engineers popping up and asking Jeff for some csh shortcut, he would squeeze shut his eyes touch his forehead and come with wired keystrokes to do the job.
Finally the tool worked i had now a list of errors to show off to them. Maybe it was the working of the tool i was not so sad i was before. Jeff seemed to be happy with his life. Was it reconciliation or happiness ?, i don't know but i chose happiness. While i was discussing the memory errors with the architect there i stated our mandatory inquiry if they used an advanced memory pool mechanism of their own, for which the tool had to be tuned. The architect answered "No the current version does not have it , but Jeff has been designing a very optimal pool, i am going to push it in this year". I saw Jeff with very raised eyebrows and new appreciation, his response began with "I did it in my free time" and continued to the implementation detail of the pool.
With the days work done and the my heart back to former state of optimism i got up to take leave, just then the good looking tools admin came in again "Jeff we have to leave now, I have to pick Tom ". Jeff in his booming voice said, "My wifes here, time to go home. bye buddy". My lips had grown into a full stretch of a huge smile by then.
