Monday morning. The office was empty and dark. Most everybody was gone for the holidays.
I walked into the conference room. Time for the end-of-sprint demo. Lou was there. Nobody else, although several dialed in on the phone as did the guys in Chennai.
Afterwards, I walked around the back of the room, over to where Lou had been running the meeting. And as I walked around the table, there on the windowsill to my left was something small, white and blue. A Staedtler eraser.
It was my Staedler eraser. The one I had misplaced the week before. The one I had searched for in vain. And in its absence, I was out of sorts. After all, what good is a 0.5mm Pentel pencil with 2B leads when you don’t have a Staedtler eraser to clean up stray marks, mistakes and miscalculations?
Now, holding it in my hand, I felt normal again.
Maybe Lou could share this moment, I thought. We’re roughly the same age. Maybe he would understand about paper and pencils and erasers and their connection to your brain thru fingers, wrist and arm. So I explained it to him. About my pencils. About my lost and found eraser. About my joy at the reunion.
But I was wrong. Lou looked up briefly but then returned to his laptop. It’s true that he and I are roughly the same age, but no, he did not understand.
… and so I thought I would share with you.