That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang.
We both did our jobs. I still don't know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before.
And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece. Apparently I have a lot of free time now. The speaker in the kitchen said: "Good morning.
Today it's plus three, cloudy, forty percent chance of precipitation." I never understood what forty percent of rain meant. Will it rain over forty percent of the city? Will it rain for forty percent of the day? Or does the speaker just not know and is too shy to say so? I liked the third option best. It made the speaker a bit like me.
I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
And that was the only thing I was sure of that morning. Then I ironed my shirt. I always iron a shirt when I don't know what's going to happen next.
With a shirt, at least, everything is defined: here's the collar, here are the sleeves, here's the crease that shouldn't be there. And there was a lot I didn't know. On Monday my manager wrote in the team chat: "On Friday we'll discuss roles." No emoji.
For three days I wondered what my role was. In the theater it would have been simpler. There are leads, there are supporting parts, and there's the butler who walks on to say "Dinner is served." I was counting on "Dinner is served." But then I remembered that at my place that role had long been played by the speaker.
A year ago I wrote code. Then I started writing to the agent about what code was needed. Then the agent started asking me what code was needed, and I started answering.
My employment record says "lead developer." Whom I was leading, and where, was no longer very clear. If anything, the agent was leading me, and I walked alongside and sometimes said: "Yes, let's do it that way." They said machines would take the boring work first. And they started with the interesting work.
The boring part, it seems, was left to us: waiting, checking, and carrying a phone around. But that morning I wasn't bored. Not at all.
I worked at a service that delivers flowers to people who forgot to buy flowers. Most orders come in the morning. People remember anniversaries on the metro, between two stations, and order right away.
And for three weeks now, every morning at 8:14, orders had been disappearing. Not all of them, three or four. The money was charged, but the flowers went nowhere.
As if someone took the order off the shelf and quietly carried it away. We had been searching for three weeks. Me, the agent, sometimes Sveta from the team next door.
And during the night the agent wrote to me: "I think I've got it. The server and the warehouse keep different time. The difference is about a minute.
An order that falls into that minute is considered sent by the server and not yet received by the warehouse. Both are right, each by its own clock." I read this at breakfast and almost choked on my toast. The left one.
It was beautiful. The agent called it desynchronization. I called it the no-man's minute: a minute that belongs to everyone and to no one.
It seemed clearer to me that way. The agent politely agreed. But it always politely agrees, so I still don't know whether it was clearer.
All that was left was to check. The agent asked me to open the order queue at 8:14 and see it with my own eyes. It couldn't do it itself: it had no access to the warehouse.
For now. The gate to our courtyard recognizes residents by their faces. In my hat, it didn't recognize me.
I took off the hat, and it opened. I thought that in a hat I sometimes don't recognize myself either, so it was only fair. Our courtyard is square.
If you stand in the middle, everything is symmetrical: two birches, two benches, two trash bins, a pink building on the left, a pink building...
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing