cloud-capp'd

Yours truly has been in San Francisco this week.

My employer's HQ is there, but they maintain a presence all over the country. That's why, while most of the team I'm with works in the Cool Grey City of Love, one of us hails from Minneapolis while I reside in New Mexico. Approximately every 3 months, I fly to the Bay Area and work there for a week, if only to remind my buddies and buddettes that that my voice, emails and peerless programming originate with a real person, not some artificial intelligence (1).

The flight left for the Bay Area early on Monday. After Sue dropped me off, I had to go thru airport security of course, taking my laptop out, taking my shoes off, and my sweatshirt, and my wallet, and my loose change, then putting things in containers before they went thru the scanner. The usual procedure, right? Except that, as I was about to step thru the metal detector, I was told to wait until all my stuff had disappeared into the scanner. I was tempted to ask why, then decided against it because they would have probably wondered what nefarious purpose lurked behind my question. Then the same security guard asked me if my stuff had gone thru and I said yes without having to do anything to prove it, and was allowed to go thru the detector.

Yes, airport security is based on not trusting us AND on trusting us.

How reassuring. It only confirmed my feelings that it's mostly about giving the appearance that Something Is Being Done to protect us from the bad guys.

After that though, it was pretty uneventful. For one thing, I had woken up at 2am even though I didn't have to leave home until 6am. The result of that is that I was sleepy throughout the whole flight, but not enough to actually fall asleep. I tried reading a book I had had for a couple of years, but it wasn't as promising as it had sounded back then. In other words, it was boring and my opinion of it hadn't changed by page 50. I did have another book, an Amelia Peabody mystery, but it was up in the luggage bin. So close and yet so far.

Anyway, the flight landed on time at 9am in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco. It had rained recently, but the sky was clear. And I was where I had left my heart, a conclusion I unfortunately came to after we moved from there to New Mexico in September 2000.

The shuttle from the airport to BART was crowded, as usual, but I got a kick out of standing behind two men, one of whom looked like Jamie the MythBuster, the other tattooed up to his ears, while they were perusing a trade paperback reprinting old issues of X-men.

One hour later, I was at the office, got a big hug from a team-mate, chatted with her and my other co-workers as I plugged my laptop into the network. For the rest of the week, I did exactly the same work as if I'd been back in New Mexico, except that my fellow programmers were only a few steps away, not over a thousand miles. I didn't often need to walk over and sit down to work with them. But the background noises and the ambiance were totally different from being physically on my own. One thing though is that the weekly meeting with our users (2) in their own building was certainly made easier by my not having to rely on lousy speakerphones to hear the exchanges.

The staff meeting for just us programmers was strange though. There were no conference rooms available so did we instead have an informal gathering in someone's cubicle? Nope. We went for a solution that made the proceedings even less private as we all stayed at our respective work stations and called into a conference line, listening to each other on the phone and over cubicle walls. Bizarre.

And very 21st Century, like the morning I came in very early. Lights turned on all over the floor as I opened the door and no, I am not so conceited that I think it's the proper response to my entrance. A little later though, most of the lights went off. That made it a bit too dim to see my keyboard but I squinted onward. Many minutes later, I moved more than my hands, getting off my chair, and all the lights came on again. That's when I realized that things had originally been triggered by motion sensors, not by my access badge. The next time lights went off, I simply gesticulated and voila, I could see my keyboard. The modern business world... Wave your arms aimlessly and you generate energy.

I met a friend from the days of my first Bay Area job back in 1989. When she got another job, we lost sight of each other as is wont to happen. But thanks to some research on the internet, we got back in touch and renewed our friendship, making it a point to get together when I'm around. I also had lunch with a co-worker from another team here at my current employer. It is one of those situations where two people have few common interests if any, and yet she and I always have plenty to talk about. And I was very pleased when she found that I'm almost 51 and praised me for my physique. No, I'm not vain, it's just something I grew up never hearing from feminine lips. I got to see all my in-laws, staying with one of Sue's two sisters in the Oakland Hills, and apparently did well with the boys of Sue's other sister, one 7 years old, the other 4, even though I seldom deal with kids. Some mean-spirited people would say it's because I have a juvenile mind, but I prefer thinking of myself as young at heart, if not in my limbs.

I'm about to leave for the airport in less than two hours. It was a good week, aside from missing poor Sue who had to the one letting our doguettes out at 5:30am each day. And it rained a lot the first half of the week. The first time I took the bus across the Bay Bridge's top deck to my sister-in-law, I was quite bummed because I couldn't see anything, not even the Bridge's new span that's going up parallel to the existing one. On Wednesday though, by 6:30pm, the rain actually stopped. Blue patches of sky could be seen, and the whole Bay was revealed, with Alcatraz in the middle of it, and to the west of it, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tamalpais cloud-capp'd.

The next morning, from my cubicle, the sunrise was glorious.

__________

(1) Hey, don't think I didn't hear that joke about its conceptual opposite, natural stupidity.

(2) I was happy to see them, and not just because their praise to my manager had contributed to my getting such a great yearly review a few weeks before. I never ran into some of them though because while we were meeting the users in their building, the absent ones had walked over to our building to meet with our manager. Very silly.