Tuesday, July 7, 2009

the company

Voila! After 2weeks of work, now i am ready to spill all about The Company. Located in a secluded industrial park and ran by a former army officer, The Company is an urban secret. The staffs are kept to a minimal of 6 exclusive members. Nobody knew the working hours of The Company. First day of work, I waited outside the closed doors of The Company at 830am. I waited. I anticipated. Finally at 905am, a non discreet figure marched towards the door. Curtly, she asked for my name and my business here. Like a good new intern on my first day of work, I snapped to attention and reported my name loudly and clearly. Satisfied, she showed me to my cubicle and showed me their technology.

My desktop flickered to life, making a soft moaning sound. Then just as immediately as it started up, like a deflated balloon, the moaning stopped after a few abrupt splutters; and my desktop flashed its last breath and died. I hit fruitlessly at the keyboard, wondering if i had caused this unnatural death. Then at that moment, I met Uncle.

Small he maybe, he commanded respect like a retired Senior Warrant Officer. I was immediately put in place as the newest recruit to The Company. "So today's drinks your treat right?" Obediently, I agreed. The two days of work passed as quickly as I busied myself with iThink, a process modeling program. When I am finally competent with iThink, my secret coding knowledge was discovered. First Lady came to my cubicle and threw the 75000 lines of codes at me and said, "Decode this." I bewilderedly repeated after her,"Decode?"

"No. Debug."

My eyes wildened with hidden fear as I saw the volume of the codes. 108 classes of Java is really not a joke. But all I managed was a lousy "Wilco" and I dived headfirst into action. The next few days, I worked like a mad scientist. By the end of the week, my
tear ducts went into hyperactivity, as I tried my best not to rub my red swollen eyes. The continuous scrolling up and down has led to muscular atrophy as my eye lids twitched uncontrollably. The debugging process was a torture that can be likened to the copying of 100 of pages of text by a primary school kid. When I finally, found BUG 1, I swore if I were in a bath tub then, I, like Archimedes, would have jumped out if it naked and ran into the streets shouting "Eureka" in my birthday suit.

3 bugs later, I am still staring at Java Decoded. Boss threw me two books to read up on Graph Theory. Frantically, I try to understand the concepts behind Directed Weighted Graphs with Degree Constraints. I am in my current situation cos Boss said, "A good solution is never as good as a perfect solution. And I do not want a heuristic solution."

Today is Day 12.
I am sipping from the cup of coffee. I am still staring at the Java Caffeinated, living up its trademark coffee logo like all good java programmer. See full size image

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