He programs, he optimizes, he thinks. And once he is finished there waits satisfaction.

“Thank you for all your hard work” his boss says “We really appreciate it”

Words are not easy for him, so he doesn’t speak. Only smiles and nods and blinks. He doesn’t say that the software was challenging to write. That there was a hard segment that stormed against him for weeks. And were it not for his diligence and effort, would have way-laid the project by months.

He does not say that the elegance found in file ‘Algorithm_search.c’ was something that the great artist Michelangelo would have been proud of. He had removed several thousand lines of code, and then optimized it in turn. This had increased the speed of the algorithm by over 80%.

He doesn’t mention that he has not slept well for several weeks. Not the pressures of the job, no far from it. More that he is concerned of what the code he is creating will eventually do.

“What do you mean they are upgrading the software?” he can hear the worker asking. “I’ve labored here for over twenty-five years! Now some dumb machine is going to do better than me?”

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