Imagine yourself off on a bus going on a business trip at some far away place. This being a far away place, you eventually fall into a very heavy sleep and loose track of time and direction. Several hours later (or maybe even days?) you are awaken by someone who, speaking a different dialect seems to be telling you that the bus has reached its destination. Still a bit groggy from the sleep you shrug off this incident, grab your bag and step out of the bus and… To your surprise, you realize that the bus station seems somewhat odd and different from what you had expected… and when paying closer attention you also notice that every thing, people, stores signs, even trees, look different. Approaching a booth that you can only assume to be the information booth (judging from the big neon question mark hanging from the ceiling right above it), you calmly ask the attendant which train will take you to your next destination. The lady, always with the dry smile on her lips, promptly replies:

[Attendant]: “Grkn hwher hawomns?” [You]: “…uh… I said: Do you know which train would take me to [insert city name here]?” [Attendant]: “Pkrt hg Grkn hwher hawomns?” (with a puzzled look on her face)

It turns out you slept through your stop and ended up going across several territorial boundaries and arriving at some small country where nobody speaks your language and you just cannot make what their language is either.

Well, this is how it felt today at my almost 2-hours long morning meeting at work! For the last 12 months I have been completely ignored by upper management and been relegated to doing office type work (an endless process of archiving emails and creating spreadsheets about these archived emails)… a complete different picture my recruiter gave me when I was hired as a .NET Developer. For the last 2 weeks “they” decided to invite me to attend their Wednesdays meeting, the same meeting they have held every single Wednesday of these last 12 months! Can you imagine how giberish everything sounded to me during those 2 hours today? Do they really expect me to get anything out of this after being kept out of the loop all this time???

Having experienced true programmer’s bliss during the first years of my previous job, my professional career seems to have gotten stuck on a major funk/bump/what have you! I have not, officially, written a single line of code for the last 16 months (including the 3 months I was unemployed last Summer and last few months at previous job) and some times wonder if I still have “game” left in me. While everyone was eating and drinking .NET or Java Beans for breakfast, I was stuck creating spreadsheets and writing up reports… I AM A DEVELOPER, for crying out loud! I need to be challenged every now and then… no… I must be challenged very often so not to weaken my coding muscles… Living these last 12 months doing nothing but spreadhseets and being treated like an outsider (is that a redundacy when it comes to consultants?)… I feel like I’m Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” barely staying awake and impatiently awaiting for the 5 o’clock whistle so I can get stuck on traffic at the Queensborough Bridge (and on the F.D.R… and the G.W. Bridge…) on my way back home!

I’m a developer and I crave the need for speed!