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- _standback_ (
_standback_) wrote,
Sleepiest. Code Zombies. EVAR.
The final project in DBI keeps me chained to my workstation.
I do not eat. I do not sleep. I do not think.
There is only the emacs. All else grows dim.
I really can't think of any phrase describing my present situation as aptly as "code zombie" does. For the past two weeks, I have literally spent every free moment in Ross or in the Aquarium. Me, and the other poor, benighted souls taking the DBI course, have found this project taking over our very lives and souls, and reducing us to our current tragic condition.
Exhausted and bleary eyed, our brains turn slowly into tapioca pudding, and the will to live is drained out of us. Our breath reeks of tepid coffee and cold pastrami sandwiches. Although the stench of rotting flesh does not surround us, I remind you that students returning to their homes and dorms at 2:30AM, whose mental facilities have shut down hours if not days ago, seldom have the energy for a shower. We sit at our desks all day and night, near-unmoving, and should we chance to rise from our seats, our movements are stiff, slow and awkward. And we see in our future nothing but our present undeath stretching onwards into bleak eternity, for the project seems never to end. And should it ever end, why then we will be face to face with final exams we should have started studying for two weeks earlier.
But we push those thoughts out of our mind. We think of nothing but the code. Or we try. For when you feel all but brain-dead, even the simplest exception-handling is beyond you, and you drift into the cold clutches of random Internet timewasters. I must thank my fellow CS blogger Kermit@CS, for his link to online Lemmings games. Were it not for Kermit and his Lemmings, I'd have spent even more time playing Quake and reading LiveJournals; at least Lemmings requires some minimal level of concentration and thought.
We wander the labs, eyes glazed. We know there is work to do, endless work, but we are never certain of what to do next. Drone-like, we drift from one random passerby to the other, staring blankly past them, intoning, "friend programmer, have you implemented SSL?" And the friend programmer, if some faculty of speech remains to him, will reply, "Nooooo," in tones dry and windy as the grave. Upon which the first will turn twenty degrees to the left, and turned his glazed eyes at the next wretched code zombie, and intone, "friend programmer, have you implemented SSL?" All is bleak. All progress is illusory; every line we write brings two bugs with it.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boy. Thank G-d it's a Friday.