Long time no talk…

So a lot’s been happening lately. We moved to a new apartment (in a relatively new city) and I got a new job. That’s what I want to talk about today.

So somehow I’ve become a programmer. Not the concertgoing / special event-planning kind but rather the computer, lightsaber-wielding, codemonkey kind.

I love the job. It’s actually pretty fun. I always thought that programmers slaved all day over lines of code, just picking out little ones and zeros and giggling about it to themselves as they went home for dinner with mom.

Well… most of that is still true, sans the mom part. Except there’s a lot more to it than that, and that’s pretty comforting. There are more pictures than I expected (good, good), and the programming part is actually kind of like playing a detective game. Like Carmen Sandiego. Except instead of Carmen you have UNIX. And instead of Rockapella you have COBOL.

But the part I’m having the hardest time with is the culture. I feel that now that I work with computers to such a large extent I need to kind of adopt the geek culture a little bit more. It shouldn’t be too hard, I thought; I already have one foot in that grave.

But–man–there’s more to it than meets the eye. Just go over to thinkgeek and tell me if you understand every single t-shirt they sell. There’s no way. But there always seems to be a few war horses that travel from cubicle to cubicle who recall working with assembly language in the same way that Vietnam War vets recall the Viet Cong.  What do you say to that? There’s some people who almost can talk in binary. That’s the ones and zeros I was talking about earlier, Holmes.

I guess what I need to do is compensate for my immediate lack of technical skills and pick up some more fringe characteristics of the community. I’m going to need someone to knit me a Harry Potter robe, stat.