A Momentary Lapse of Reason

This is a guest blog entry for Ramblings of a Geek. While clearly a different sort of geek than the owner of this blog - I'm comics, he's computers - I'm confident that I can ramble with the best of them! As I say at my own blog, "I'm Kimota94, and you're not (unless somehow... you are)." That's, of course, a riff on Chevy Chase's old Saturday Night Live line, revealing not only the way my humour tends to run, but also my advanced age!

Speaking of being old: while everyone knows I'm really only a day older today than I was yesterday, in a demographic - or actuarial - sense I somehow find myself an entire year closer to my life expectancy figure on this particular day. That's gobbley gook for "it's my birthday." I tip the scales at 44 years of age today, a full 33% further along than the usual writer here.

As it happens, I've known "the Human Calculator" for more than a fifth of those years that are piling up under my belt. James showed up at my previous job at the bank as a fresh faced new hire during a period of growth we were experiencing at that time. Considering when that was - 1998 - we were probably bulking up with Y2K coders back then, not so much to provide their software expertise to the problem which was pretty much solved already anyway, but rather to give us more bodies to throw in front of the crazed hordes that were expected to show up in the wee hours of New Year's Day 2000, recreating, as it were, the run on the bank that was immortalized in the film It's A Wonderful Life.

Fortunately, it never came to that. As we all know, Al Gore built a time machine in early 2000, amidst the smoking ruins of civilization that sprawled around him, and travelled back to the mid-1980s and worked tirelessly to get companies working on the Y2K problem in time to avoid that catastrophe. How he has the energy to do the same thing, again, regarding Global Warming, is beyond me, but of course that's only part of the equation as to why he'll eventually be remembered as one of the greatest world leaders of all time.

At any rate, eventually "Jimmy Hinckley", as I like to call him, left the bank to follow new paths of glory, and half a year or so later I followed him. One of the easiest questions I've been asked in recent years has been, "Do you ever regret leaving that job?" Whatever the ups and downs we may experience at our current company, I've never looked back, and I suspect James hasn't, either. We've both done well in our careers since jumping ship, and I can't help but feel that our employer's done well by us. And everything we left behind, from what I hear, is still there, bedeviling the folks who couldn't bring themselves to do anything about it. At last count, James and I have something like 8 other former bank employees among our numbers at the new workplace, and that's kind of cool.

I could write more on these topics and others, but I'd best save something for the day when I reach 40 Blog Points hereabouts. And if Hinckley keeps putting up those math problems, that shouldn't be too long at all....