Close to the Machine

In the middle of the demo, I realized how fortunate we were to be engineers. How lucky for us to be people who built things and took our satisfactions from humming machines and running programs. We certainly wouldn’t mind if the company went public and we all got fabulously rich. But the important thing was right in front of us. We had started with some scratchings on a whiteboard and built this: this operational program, this functional thing.

She stopped, a dark look on her face.
“The problem is the programmers. Especially the ones working with the new stuff. Nobody can figure out how to manage them.”

I started to panic. Before this meeting, the users existed only in my mind, projections, all mine. They were abstractions, the initiators of tasks that set off remote procedure calls; triggers to a set of logical and machine events that ended in an update to a relational database on a central server. Now I was confronted with their fleshly existence.

A printed agenda was handed around the conference table. The first item was “Review agenda.” My programmer-mind whirred at the implication of endless reiteration: Agenda. Review agenda. Agenda. Forever.