Diary of a Programmer 19: When All the Work is Done on Thursday in Pankow
the stone masons just finished laying a new sidewalk out front.
it only took them a week and a half.
but here we are almost at the end of a second iteration
and we haven’t even finished the voucher project.
at least fare optimization is under review and on target
for deploy at the end of next week.
it occurs to me that the robots doing my job in the future
won’t appreciate the efficiency with which I lay around
on Thursday afternoon catching up on a sleepless night
of fucking the common whore of the state
having prepared the mortar that will keep the home
plate shaped stones of the internet together
so that the neighbourhood doesn’t have to walk to the train
via some ridiculous detour through the park.
nor will they look back with nostalgia and consider
the not so automated way that humans worked in the past,
using stubby fingers of their hands to punch in blocks
of code into the fully bot run internet which,
in its current iteration, has unimaginable roots
in punch card fed computers that once filled
enormous conference rooms at IBM, rampant
with errors that will be thought to have been easily avoided
by the quantum tech lead bots of the twenty three hundreds.
And there are chirps from the great tits outside
who build nests from fox hair and twigs and bits of string
only with their tiny beaks as I close my eyes for a nap
as I listen to my lover on a work video call in the next room
discussing what to do with incorrectly inputted line items
in a spreadsheet and how to unassign accounts
that were assigned by sales department colleagues
who are trying to bend the rules or because they are lazy
which just ends up creating more work for everyone
but isn’t that the point of work to create more work
so that we all have a job for longer and get paid?
or is the point of work to create less work for everyone?
for me the answer to these questions doesn’t matter
as I’ll be out of a job in less than five years anyway.