The 6 -2 work day back in the day

I’m writing again tonight.

There is a lot of throwbacks in one’s life. Mine, no less.

It was late Spring of 2007. The blazing heat in San Ramon was too hot to handle. A hundred degrees of warmth and misguided sunshine can and had killed my sincere motivation at work. Not a breeze of pleasant surprise to say the least.

I would clock in at 6am Pacific Standard Time to find myself seated in a small cubicle somewhere in the west wing of AT&T in Pleasanton, California. I forget exactly on what floor. My small cubicle was befitting to my role as a back end engineer who had to ensure a tiny piece of middleware operation would perform as it should. Nothing fancy, just logics and algorithms of computer language. I was one of thousands of computer engineers who was working on the Lightspeed project – version 7.

Boring.

Anyway, a typical day for me was ongoing conference calls with St Louis office in the Midwest. They are 2 hours ahead of us. Meaning, they are eating breakfast while I am still rubbing my eyes at six o seven am during our very early “online meeting”.  It was this time of my life, that I developed utter need for my black cup of coffee. Strong, bold, eye-opening cup of coffee.

By 2pm, after much of my brain is loaned to my job, I’m out of work because I take no lunch breaks. That’s a solid 8 hour work day I clock in daily.

Can u imagine the sun at 2pm on a hot sunny day? And I mean maximum sun! Yea, no fun.  Unless, you’re at the beach on some paradise island somewhere in the tropics. In which case, you get to go dip in the ocean when it gets icky and stuffy on the beach.