9am and on. Of races, tools and pragmatism, and the unavoidable win of a shared spreadsheet over more sophisticated tools with implementation and adaption curves steep enough to prevent them from even materializing. (Calls and interrupts. Sharpening the pencil, more as a mental exercise than an actual need. If anything, giving up on paper loses the experience of calm from numbly handling materia.)
Wieder halb durch den Tag, alles fühlt sich noch früher als sonst an. Einige Punkte fallen aus der Liste, das Gros der berührten Themen indes ist langwierig und zäh. Nebenan diskutiert ein Entwickler einen komplexen Fehler, und im weitestgehend leeren Raum bleibt sein Geheimnis, dem die Erklärungen genau gelten. Bürohund schläft vor seiner Zimmertür, lässt sich die letzten der heutigen Sonnenstrahlen über das Fell wandern, ignoriert klingelnde Telefone und Vorübergehende geflissentlich. Einige Schreibtische weiter singen Lüfter der schweren Maschinen in einem eigenartigen, schiefen Chor. Noch kein Glühwein, aber zumindest Aprikosenkuchen. So geht es wohl auch.
9am and on. Always in between people and voices. Fragmented these days are. The goodness, however, of taking and finalizing notes on time and even discussing random topics of the hour with the model. Like: Why is adding complexity to code often a good way of slowing everything down, both in development and on actual machines? Or, how to explain ramifications of different ideas of "complexity" to users suffering from slow or limited software? (No response, so far.)
11am and on. In between blue boxes, timeframes and priorities. Monday mornings aren't for fixing things but just for reviewing and briefly browsing through everything that was left behind open and unaddressed. Model's been asleep for hours now, and the day itself somehow struggles to really wake up. Grey skies hovering across grey streets.
(Getting up early enough, taking a breath at 8am already feels like noon. Not really listening to the voices in the street, but the sounds making it through the open window feel vivid and in a way very comfortable. Not yet completely lost within the trails of the day, contemplating more coffee and how to align all of the upcoming blocks to not waste too much time in between. But then again, is spare time ever wasted?)
10am and on. Milestones and checkmarks again. These moments in which that dreaded early morning blues feels not hours but days, weeks ago. Taking a short break to catch some fresh air, window opened wide. Bright days countering the pale grey mood of the year quickly moving on. The janitor next door is dumping baskets of garbage into a huge container, and suddenly there's that feeling again of getting rid of unneeded things, at least of some - knowing very well this will end up stuck and smothered the very moment this idea gets more serious. (Having another coffe instead. Deleting some notification messages. That's as clean as it gets, to move on.)