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The Better Day

Mon, 18 Apr 2016, 10:03 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

Boston was today. What you have been training for over these many months. And from a distance, from a long distance with a hot cup of coffee on the desk beside me, I brought up the race-tracker and prepared to follow your trek from Hopkinson to the finish line.

What was it? Wave 3? And which corral was it you started in? 9:30, you said. You said you’d be off at 9:30. So at 9:50, I entered your bib number and up popped the table charting your progress. Except, yeah. You had started just 20 minutes before, so you were unlikely to be at the 5K mark, yet. 

And so I took a sip of coffee and ran a few database queries to try to figure out why my messages weren’t showing up in RabbitMq. And the queries led me to make a few changes to my XSLT. Which led to some scratching of my head. Which continued for hours, until it was lunchtime and I was famished, and the code was still not working, and then the code was working, but something was still missing, and I had to insert some reference data into a lookup table… until there was a clap of thunder outside and it was late afternoon.

I uncovered on the race-tracker window to see that it was long since over. You had indeed finished.

So this is how it went: As you ran. I sat. As you kept your steady pace. I puzzled over my messages. And as you climbed those hills at the end, I confess I was sitting in the comfort of a desk chair with a coffee cup beside me long-gone-cold.

Who had the better day? The race-tracker tells no lies. I saw your splits. You did. Congratulations.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License