Wednesday 1 October 2003

Pic of the day: Archive photo from one of my trips to the west coast, showing a river where I used to play when I was small. But as the saying goes, you cannot step into the same river twice ... the river has changed, and so have you.

Rings in water

It is not every day you get to see the results of your work on the front of your favorite newspaper, especially if that newspaper is a national one. (Even in a small nation such as Norway...) In fact, this is the first time for me. I guess it's a nice thing to take with you.

Dagens Næringsliv had a lengthy article about the sale of InkassoSentralen. Now that was a familiar name. It is familiar to a lot of other people too, these days. But it wasn't, back when a friend asked me to computerize it, back when we were both much younger. He was leading a small debt reclaiming company in Kristiansand, with a handful of women doing office work. Despite the grand name, there wasn't much "central" about it ... just a bunch of people struggling to make it run in a few rooms in the city.

The guy did have some good ideas, though. The girl who was their bookkeeper had even more. And I had the tools to make their ideas into software. Back then was when I really loved to program, and I did. I ran rings around the competition. Alone, on my free time. It is weird to think back now. The things we do for fun and friendship.

The new, computerized company had lost a couple of their already few workers. But it started to grow. And grow. When my friend sold it to a competitor, it was "our" software and name they stuck with. Later it has evidently happened again. Of course, this is so long ago now, the software must have changed beyond recognition. I have had no hand in it for many years. But I was there when we set it all in motion.

***

Oh, it is several times a year that I see a familiar name on the front page, a company that has bought my software at some time or another in the past. It is a rather extensive suit of programs, which took quite a bit of selling and support (from which my friend made a living), so I would know at least a good number of the companies he sold it to. People have saved millions using that software which we made back then. And sometimes I see those names again, and briefly reflect on the weirdness of it.

I got fed up with programming eventually. I am a man who easily gets fed up, I guess. That, and it entered a phase where it was mostly totally boring stuff like designing reports for suits, not helping working people do their job better. For me, programming was a spiritual thing, using a gift. I never made much money from it, and it did not much change my life. But it changed the lives of companies and people who worked there. This is all in the past, but the names keep showing up.

And I briefly wonder what would have happened if I had continued along that path. It felt, back then, as if nothing was impossible for me, if it could at all be done with a computer. On the other hand, I never pursued these things. If people did not come to me, that was their problem. If I had been only slightly different, what could I have done? I will never know. In our timeline, it never happened. And now that time is over. I am just a sickly old man. The stone has passed through the surface and is sinking slowly down through the deep. Only the rings on the surface grow wider and wider, until they pass utterly out of sight, a part of the pattern of all things.