The Corporate Runs

The Balance of Stewardship

As they hugged good-bye at the airport curb, Tripper could feel the fragility in the life-worn body of the old man.

"Are you sure you don't want me to walk you to the gate?"

Tripper's father scrunched his face in disgust. "Don't be ridiculous! Besides, you'll get towed if you stand around here too long."

"Ok, I was just asking."

"You never think about these things, Maurice." (It was Tripper's turn to wince. His father

was the only person left alive who called him by his given name.)

Tripper was raised with a steady and firm hand, even when it wasn't called for. Even after all these years, the father never missed an opportunity to lecture his son. At this point he was doing it more out of habit than the love, mentorship, mistrust, feelings of superiority or projected (and therefore contagious) insecurity that fathers seem compelled by grand forces of the universe to use as motivations to sermonize their children. Even self-aware fathers don't seem willing or able to stop themselves and Tripper's father was no exception; not when he was responsible for Tripper or now that the balance of stewardship had tipped the other way.

"You're always too willing to take chances and risks. Just think about what would happen if your car were to be towed away from here. How would you get home?"

"I'm not going home, I'm going back to the office."

"Why don't you think about these matters more seriously? Why don't you think about life more deeply? Then you wouldn't make such poor choices."

"Because an over-examined life is not worth living."

"No, no, Socrates said 'the life which is unexamined is not worth living.'"

"Right, and look where all the examination got him."

"I wouldn't say these things if I didn't I see you carrying this recklessness to your work."

"I don't like where this is going."

"How can you release a program when you know it has bugs in it?"

"Don't you have a plane to catch?"

"My plane doesn't depart for another two and a half hours."

Tripper was trying to get out of the conversation but felt obligated to hang in there, and like the desperate amorous performer who endeavors to distract himself with free-throw averages, he was frantically trying to remember all the design change requests he was planning on submitting before the painfully arbitrary and artificial deadline of midnight that night. The sound of his father's voice summoned up deeply etched neural pathways (much, much, deeper than any DCRs) and weakened his strength to concentrate on his self-inflicted diversions. I don't know what I'll do if the next sentence starts with 'Back in my day...' he found himself thinking.

"Back in my day, we fixed every bug and we certainly didn't have anything called a 'debugger.'

Our eyes were the only debuggers we needed."

"Maybe you're right about the car, Dad. I should probably get it out of the white zone.

It is for passenger unloading and loading only and you are officially unloading."

The old man had wisdom and was going to impart it, even if it fell on deaf ears. He did, in his own way, hear Tripper and for the rest of the conversation he tried to keep an eye on the idling, triple-parked vehicle. "In our day we caught the bugs before they went out and fixed them."

"Except that I've never crashed a satellite into the surface of another planet."

"No, no, that happened after my days at the lab. Either way, at the least the work was useful, it served a greater purpose."

"Like turning E. T. onto Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson," Tripper said, crossing over to defensiveness. Taking the bait, the hook and the sinker whole, he continued: "I know you look down on commercial and corporate software. I get that. But I've been doing this a long time and I've worked on products that have sold tens of millions of copies and have been pirated at least that many times. In my experience, people rarely steal things they don't find useful. People use this stuff to educate themselves, to express themselves, to reunite refuge families, and even to save lives. I don't say I like the process, far from it. There isn't a roll of toilet paper long enough to list the things I try to change about the way we do things, but the overall effect has been a net positive. And while the planets will be there for a few billion years, commercial software has a slightly faster turn-around, and yes, sometimes we have to make hard choices about what features to cut and which bug fixes to postpone in order to meet the real needs of a competitive and demanding marketplace. And speaking of competition, you don't know how easy you have it in the early releases when things are still small and manageable for about the first three versions, but you better beg for divine intervention by version 8 because no matter what the competition throws at you, it will never compare to competing with versions 1 through 7 of your own codebase for compatibility; especially when it comes to interop with all the other version 8 products that people are just assuming will continue to work flawlessly together with yours. And don't even get me going on sharing unproven code with other products!"

The elder remained stoic as Tripper continued his tirade, fists clenched, arms swinging as if he were holding a bat.

"Sure, it's easier when all the developers are using the products they make on a day-to-day basis; they're the ones uncovering the bugs and they can go in and fix the problems themselves. But you can forget about that luxury when you make software for everyday, normal people, something we, as developers definitely don't qualify as. So we rely on armies of gonzo testers, where signs of dementia are a plus in the interview, to work in quote, unquote, parallel to the development team while the poor, lowly documentation minions, wondering what ever happened to their once-promising writing careers, try to explain everything going on to people who weren't born with QWERTY keyboards as appendages."

Tripper took a much needed breath but carried on nonetheless.

"Look, I have nothing but respect for what you accomplished in your career and even admire, in a profound way, the problems you had to solve and the way you solved them, but I've got my hands full with sleazy, myopic marketers, a world-class sophistic, Napoleonic vice president, and a program manager who dropped off the face of the earth running from poker debt, so I would appreciate it if you could cut me just a micron of slack!"

Tripper finally paused, waiting for response, staring into the octogenarian eyes behind thick tri-focal lenses of his stone-faced father.

"Well," the old man finally said, staring back, "at least you rationalize with passion."

After a pause and no response from Tripper, he motioned toward the terminal, "Now I better go and get my seat reservation., I don't trust those airline reservation systems as far as I can throw them."

The conversation faded into familial cordialities yet Tripper was gripped by an urgent need to convey his deep feelings of love for his father before they parted. Without questioning their origin, these feelings conspired to push the point and share with his father who received the sentiments with grace and mutuality.

Tripper's father turned quickly to walk into the terminal. The small rolling suitcase he started to pull behind him tilted up on one wheel, teetered, and then fell over on its side, stopping him in his tracks with a jerk. He turned back around as they both leaned over to pick it up off its side. "Damn thing is busted!"

After Tripper checked the bag for damage and having found none he asked, "You mean gravity?"

Tripper decided to linger, pivoting his attention between the terminal and his car. He suddenly realized that his father was standing at the end of the ticket line for the wrong airline. Without hesitation, he jogged into the terminal and up to the line. After much pointing at signs, monitors, confirmation-coded paperwork, and ticket taker's uniforms, they finally walked across the terminal to stand in the proper line. They said their second round of goodbyes quickly.

Tripper emerged from the terminal just in time to watch his car, hitched to the back of a tow truck, fade out of the passenger drop-off area and an airport security officer flip his ticket book closed and walk away from the spot where he had left his car.

He put his hands on his hips, hung his head, and heaved a deep sigh.