I forgot I had a meeting that went on until 3:15. I got back to my desk and of course, the coffee van had been and gone. Misery settled in like the weather.
I didn't even have coins for the vending machine. A Nutri-Grain would've done it, not to mention a sneaky bar of Dairy Milk.
Oh Dairy Milk, with your creamy chocolate and rich velvety texture! You snap off so firmly between the teeth and melt like luxury in the mouth, tantalising every taste bud with your smooth and succulent flavours...
... oh. I'd better stop that in case you happen to be fasting chocolate. That'd be a bit insensitive - the equivalent of you telling me about a lovely cup of tea with its warm trickle and delicate blend of delicious tastes ... and right now, I don't want to think about tea, thank you very much.
Mmmm.
Snap out of it, Stubbsy.
Where was I? I was hungry. Yes, hungry and really annoyed - two things I'd rather not be. I get a bit grumpy when not fed very well. I understand a lot of guys are the same - like machines, we rely on an input in order to function. The machinery's really simple - without regular input, we have nothing to process so all our power gets diverted to other functions. Eventually, we can't sustain our normal output rate so what comes out is gibberish, followed by the sound of cogs grinding to a halt, irrational noises and a general inability to do what's asked of us. No input; no output.
I hate to say it, but women are a bit more complicated than an I/O machine. I have a theory but I value my life and I'm not brave enough to share it. It does involve cats left to their own devices though, so I'll leave it at that.
Thankfully, Winners was on-hand for another of our famous Skype-chats. A conversation about the government and privatisation led to him going on about 'oxygen-thieves' and me trying to think up a children's book that used that title. The Oxygen Thieves.
I got as far as aliens poisoning adults with invisible gas which hypnotised them into helping them steal our oxygen. In the end the aliens would naturally be thwarted by a plucky group of asthmatic children whose inhalers somehow immunised them against the hypno-gas...
'I'm in the wrong job,' I told Winners, whimsically at the end of all of that.
'LOL' he replied.
I think what really annoyed me was the fact that the meeting that made me miss the twenty-to-three coffee van... was almost irrelevant to me. Only four people turned up and I sat there like a piece of furniture listening to problems about coding and technical debt. I knew that at some point, one of the other three would turn to the piece of furniture and say 'You're very quiet, Matt...' and I'd need to say something intelligent. So, I spent a while imagining this thing called technical debt as a black hole, swallowing up everything around it and bending time into a gravity well so that estimates get pulled out of shape whenever we get anywhere near it...
... the trouble was that imagining black holes made me think about the vast cavern that was rumbling quietly within the walls of my stomach, and soon I was imagining myself gobbling up hamburgers and cornish pasties and cakes and biscuits and chocolate like a hungry hippo. I too, it seemed, had a technical debt.
In the grand scheme of things though, what does it matter? A third of the world was hungrier than me today - many of them will die because of it. Tea is a luxury drink from another planet, supped by rich people. I sit in meetings where people spend hours discussing complexities heaped on top of complexities and I often drift off, wondering whether any of it will ever make a real difference.
The rain bounced off the tarmac outside, and trickled down the window.
'You're very quiet, Matt,' said one of the other three.
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