Humour

Getting your gorilla moments

T A Balasubramanian writes that an IT professional’s real job is—the management of endless interruptions at work.

Ready to leap again into the unknown, Bobo Jitter, the perennially unsettled CIO of Bazooka Company is back for a long and cozy session with the inimitable Dr Don Jong. Known simply as The Oddfather, Dr Jong has a highly refined ability to come up with zany solutions for handling the admittedly zany conditions that are peculiar to the IT world.

Bobo, nervous in his usual way, is wringing his hands today, and he keeps walking around in an agitated state until he is guided to the couch and gently asked to rest.

“So what’s on your mind, Bobo … of course you seem to have more than the usual set of troubles, if I may say so?” says Dr Jong, lighting his pipe and breaking into a smile.

“Doc, what would you do if you had to rush around answering a bell that kept going off at random intervals all day? I mean, a really jangling, annoying bell that demands an answer?”

“Ah, I possess no such bell, my friend. I do not have doorbells—only a melodious chime. I do not have a telephone with an annoying bell sound, and I do not have have a nasty alarm bell on my clock that will shatter my sleep.”

“You are lucky, Doc. But I have to put up with something much worse than the annoying bell I mentioned. I keep having distracting demands made on my time all day long at work.”

“How is that happening, Bobo?”

“To explain that, I will have to tell you more about my work. Is software development an engineering discipline? Is it art? Is it more like a craft? We IT guys like to think that it is all of these things, and none of them. The truth is that software is a uniquely human struggle with the brain, because despite all of the technological trimmings, we are manipulating little more than the thoughts in our heads, struggling to keep our focus on the project goals and on little details like syntax and loops. Now that is pretty sensitive work, you will agree, Doc.”

“Indeed so, my boy. Like the work we psychiatrists do. Except that we manipulate thoughts in your head, not our own, thankfully.”

“As Fred Brooks put it rather eloquently some 30 odd years ago: the programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realising grand conceptual structures.”

“That is indeed, impressive, Bobo. So you build castles in the air, eh?”

“A metaphor, so to speak. Well, the castles are useful for Bazooka, Doc. In a way, we technology dreamers are quite lucky. We get the opportunity to create entire worlds out of nothing but thin air. Our very own worlds, complete with our own laws of physics. We may get those laws wrong of course, but it’s still fun.”

“Ah, that is so true. It is fun to invent anything.”

“But as I shall show you, this very tractability has its own problems. This wonderful ability comes at a price, Doc. We continually face the most frightening sight known to a creative person: the blank page. The writer’s terrifying block.”

“The sudden drought in the middle of a flood? I know, I know. We doctors get that sinking feeling too, when we cannot make out what condition is afflicting a patient too strangely. We face, like you so neatly put it, the terrifying block.”

“My point is, that we need to have the utmost concentration. We cannot afford to have bells and whistles going off nearby when we are facing the blank page. We need complete silence and peacefulness.”

“And you do not experience this silence and peacefulness when you work, eh? Why is that so?”

“Distractions and interruptions, Doc. If you sit in my workplace for an hour, you will be subjected to a stream of noisy disturbances that make it impossible for your lofty mind to concentrate on the blankness of the coding sheet. Telephones. People popping in with requests. E-mail beeps. Ringtones on my mobile. Users wanting my immediate attention, or my blood, or both. The result is that I get caught in this multitasking muddle. Chasing everything that comes my way, but unable to tie it up neatly or logically because the next emergency always interrupts the present one.”

“Ah, the perils of doing many things in parallel. Why not shut it all out? Close the cabin door and tell people that you cannot be distracted for, say, three hours or more since you are engaged in—shall we say—higher pursuits of the noble mind?”

“Close the door? Are you nuts? These distractions are part of the way we do business at Bazooka—we interact and buzz each other like a hive full of bees in a dance. It drives me crazy, this non-stop random flow of interruptions.”

“So it does not let you do your program thinking peacefully, all this continuing interruption? You still have the terrifying block to overcome?”

“That’s right, Doc. Multi-tasking sounds good on paper, but when you do it every day as part of the business, it scrambles your brain. I would gladly run away from the desk, but duty binds me.”

“Then what you must seek are gorilla moments. You must be like the escaped gorilla who went missing from the zoo.”

“Ah, the allusion escapes me, Doc.”

“Well, the entire town was shaken up, assuming that a wild gorilla was rampaging around. But in the evening, the gorilla walks back into the zoo, right into his enclosure.”

“Why would he do that?”

“It was feeding time, and, being hungry after his long city tour, he missed the easy dinner served right on time every night in his cage. In a moment, he changed back to being a zoo creature. You see, we may want to break loose from the daily sense of ennui or desperation that habit creates, but we also want the comfort of our regular habits to give meaning to our existence. We want our gorilla moments.”

“Maybe so, Doc. But these interruptions in my work are not comforting, I can tell you. Multi-tasking makes me a stressed out gorilla, not a peaceful one.”

“Gorillas are always ready to stop being peaceful, Bobo. I am reminded of this little incident. I got into a cab last night heading from home to the airport. I was caught behind a big crowd that was pushing its way ahead to a rock concert. My old Indian cab driver suddenly kicked the taxi into gear and zipped around a line of cars, edging us five cars closer to freedom. ‘I hate traffic’, he grumbled. ‘You picked the wrong job, then, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘No! I love my job. My job is to fight the traffic.’ Now that was a gorilla moment for me.”

“Ah, so, I see how this could work, Doc. It is for me to see that my real job is in the management of these endless interruptions? Not in wishing them away?”

“Voila! You have had a gorilla moment, my boy! Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest and writer who authored 40 books on the spiritual life, once wrote: I used to get upset about all the interruptions to my work, until one day I realised that the interruptions were my real work. You see what some writers can come up with?”

“Maybe he never got past his terrifying writer’s block, Doc.”