I hope you've all read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and if you haven't go read it and come back again for a deeper appreciation of this post.  It's a short read and today is Saturday, so it is a workable plan I've outlined.

    He was a young man who worked alone at a computer in a large company and he had gone eighty-four seconds now without taking a blink.  An azure background shimmered still and flat on the monitor and he cast his pointer over an icon.  The Intel Core 2 Duo processor twitched and brought up SolidWorks from the depths of the hard drive.  He was an experienced draftsman and designer of devices and he had made a life of harnessing the power of the silicon and drawing out of it things fantastic.
    He cast about on the server for the model he sought.  The file, a large assembly, seemed to have disappeared for a moment, but returned to his view.  It had darted out the other side of the folder and tried to sever the links binding it to its subordinate parts and to him.  He strained as he was dragged along the opening sequence of the enormous assembly.  The parts were scattered about the folder and he scrambled to right them as fast as the assembly demanded them.  The hard drive screamed in protest and his skin became raw on the index finger and the heel of his hand.  Sweat stains grew on his armpits and the shirt that had been pressed that morning became wrinkled.
    The assembly dug deep and fast, searching for a way to shake a part or mismatch a relation.  He had lost sight of the server long ago, enmeshed in silent and personal battle against the assembly.  Fewer warnings came now.  Relations were reestablished, and the dangling ones deleted.  At last, the goliath assembly came into view on his screen.  Complex and magnificent in scope, clean and aesthetically proportioned, it lay before him, his for the updating.  
    A dialog box popped up, followed by another.  More appeared, the assembly froze and gradually began to white out in blocks.  He clicked frantically at the boxes, but the title bars turned white.  In desperation, he clicked for the X in the upper right, and it depressed, but nothing happened.  His head hung low over the keyboard as the screen returned to a flat, unresponsive blue.  
    He was a young man who worked alone at a computer in a large company and he had gone eighty-four weeks now without getting a promotion.

 

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