Here and Now
I am the proud owner of a Nerf Super Soaker
Flip Fill Water Blaster, and I know how to use it.
This gun replaced my previous Nerf Super Soaker Pistol, which had a decent range of 30 feet, but had begun to leak profoundly.
My eagle-eyed lil’ grandbuddy spotted the new box immediately and of course, wanted to play with it. But it was January, so I told him it was a summertime swimming-pool toy and he could play with it then; he reluctantly acquiesced.
Now I’m not sure what I’ll do when summer gets here, because I didn’t get that gun for swimming pool play. I got it to defend my porch.
Have you ever had a fur-covered nemesis in your yard? Even though I’m in the city limits, there’s an abundance of neighborhood wildlife.
We have deer so tame they’ll lie around under our trees like they were pet goats. We also have groundhogs, who pose no threat that I’m aware of, but just sit up on their hind legs looking around till a car comes near, then quickly lumber (how do you even do that?) into their burrow which at my house is the storm drain running under the road. The other day I saw a groundhog going into one end of the culvert and a cat going into the other. I didn’t stick around. The potential was terrifying; I didn’t want to know. They probably just went to sleep.
But, we also have foxes. With thick red fur and a bushy tail, a healthy fox may be beautiful to behold, but our neighborhood foxes are way past looking pretty; they have manifested themselves as the predators they are. I know we’ve living in what they consider to be their turf, but when one summer a neighbor has a fox family in his backyard that leaves the heads of another neighbor’s chickens they just murdered lying around in his driveway like some Godfather message, and the next summer, a friend’s cat gets an $800 chunk bitten out of his flank, these red dog-cousins are just getting too territorial.
Will I use my Nerf gun to chase groundhogs from my culvert, deer from my pansies, or foxes (God forbid) from my outdoor kitty cat? Naw…I’m okay with the deer, the groundhogs are too stinking cute to bother, and I’m way too slow for the foxes.
I’m just after one little tomcat who fervently believes that my porch belongs to him and makes it a priority to mark it often, so all the neighbor-cats will know.
I’m sure he first noticed my porch when I accidentally left my outdoor kitty’s food bowl out after she had finished dining and left some kitty biscuits behind. Now, I’m not one to deprive a kitty-cat of nourishment, but this is a well-fed nearby-dwelling critter who just enjoys foraging for high-quality kitty biscuits (that I sure don’t leave out anymore), and he wants to own the source.
My porch is not his territory. It belongs to a sweet little silky black cat to whom I made a promise years ago, and I’m keeping that promise. Being a laid-back grown-up girl kitty, she has no truck with defending her own porch; she just lays aside and lets the fella have his way with the porch corners. Lucky girl, she knows her sustenance is secure, whether she bats a paw or not.
I’m using the gun to spray the cat back.
This isn’t another cat story; I’ve already done that one. It’s just a preface to something I’ve been wanting to write. I hope you’ll read on with me.
“When are you going to retire?”
I am of that certain age that prompts well-meaning people to ask this question. And while the frequency of the question increases with time, the answer stays the same: “Maybe in about five more years.”
All my friends within three years of me have retired, and while they have (mostly) weathered the life change intact, their lives are now different in ways that I’m not ready for my life to be different. You see, I love my life the way it is right now, and most of all, I love my job.
I never say that without feeling a bit obnoxious, and if you’re in a job you can’t wait to retire from, I’ve had those jobs myself and would be right there with you. But I got lucky this time around: nearly twenty years ago I found myself in the most perfect job on earth, for me.
My work embraces my inner introvert. I work alone in a nice quiet office, and am required to attend very few meetings. I do not supervise anyone, and my own supervisor trusts me to the point that we only touch base when there’s important information to share. I get to think, and create, and learn. Every single day.
Because I’m not of a wandering nature, I don’t take long trips, which frees up my vacation time to be used on day-long paddle trips, or to watch my granddaughter play softball in Alabama. The nature of my work allows short-notice leave (as long as my tasks are current, and they always are), so I’m secure in the knowledge that one of those 78-degree February days really can let me answer the call of the river.
My work? I write code. I work in higher education, building apps for my college’s intranet. My fifteen-second elevator description is, “I design, build, maintain, and support over 25 apps that bring efficiency to my colleagues’ days at work, and value to my organization.”
We deliver accredited, career-growing instruction in more than forty locations throughout nine Northwest Georgia counties, so when a decision was made in the ’00s to create internal workflow tools for efficiency, I was in the right place at the right time and joined the team to build them.
When a coworker wants to request time off, they use one of my apps. Their supervisor uses the app to approve it, and the payroll technician uses it to ensure accuracy.
When a supervisor has an open position, they use one of my apps to describe it, upload documentation relative to it, and receive the five required administrative signatures on it, sometimes all within an hour. You can imagine the paperwork this thing replaced. Nine counties.
When we need documentation for an accreditation visit, it has already been gathered and stored in several of our apps, and when it’s annual performance evaluation time, you’ve got it – there’s an app for that, too. Our apps are used to reserve meeting facilities across all of our campuses, and if your ceiling light is burned out or your plumbing is in disarray…. yep, an app. Facilities staff use it to make their daily task lists, and if any of these things ever misbehave, you may be sure I hear about it.
More than three hundred faculty members use an app that was last updated in 2009 to create fresh syllabi for every class they teach, every semester. A syllabus may be created in fifteen minutes, and each one is preserved in an archive. That’s more than 32,000 syllabi served by this little workhorse of an app! It is about to be replaced with a shiny new version that I’ve been building since July, and trust me, it’s earned the right to retire with dignity.
How did I get here? Besides blind luck, it’s just that I wanted to learn to code at the same time my college needed someone to do that. There were originally three of us, and the others built apps we still use too, but I wound up the last nerd standing.
Why have I remained in this little niche-cubby instead of purveying my skills throughout the high-revenue, high-reward tech industry? Refer to the lifestyle description above. And anyway, I never would have survived in a development environment with more than one person. Developers work in teams; constant communication and pulling your own weight are essential. I code so slowly that it would drive a development team to lose their minds, and me to lose my job.
All of my users are internal, and we’re surrounded by high-level security protocols, so while I code with best practices, our technology team does the heavy lifting on security, leaving me free to just build apps. Some apps are show-horses, turning flips, purveying targeted notifications, and populating complex data tables, some help us pay people, and some save us money. One of them is old enough to drive, and still performs perfectly, every day. (Its screens *are* butt-ugly to look at though.)
Because these are business apps, all they need to do is work great; they don’t need to “sizzle”. Not having to deal with graphics, videos, and state-of-the-art design makes my left brain so happy! Oh, and I also get to make my own deadlines. It just doesn’t get any better than this. I know, obnoxious.
So here’s my answer to “When are you going to retire?”
When it’s not fun to go to work anymore. When I no longer find myself standing in the shower thinking through a feature I’m going to go in and write. When my brain’s processor stops letting me keep enough code in my RAM to make my work efficient. When I no longer love my co-workers (not gonna happen). If work ever stops being like solving puzzles all day long, I’ll move on, but there won’t be enough Sudoku in the world to fill the hole.
The world isn’t ready for me to be out on the streets with my hyperactive brain suddenly idle. I would go stake out that tomcat eight hours a day and take on the other beasts too.
For now, the world needs me where I am. I’ll know when it’s time to go somewhere else.
For now, the neighborhood critters are safe.
