I am working for a time traveler

So today I would like to tell a little story in honor of back to the future day. This is a true story, and happened around a month and a half ago in late August or early September (too long to be a back to the future joke), and I was debating if I should blog about it as I was still working for the guy, but now as the project is coming to a close, and I doubt I am getting paid anyways, I don't feel bad at all posting this to the internet.

I am working for a guy who thinks he is a time traveler. I really wish I was making this up, because that would mean he isn't bat shit insane, and I would still probably get paid for this project, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Let me start from the beginning. Last year along with graduating from my normal high school, I also graduated from a half day technical school I was attending as well (which I won't name due to the contents of this story). I was studying computer programming, and (it's hard to say this humbly) I was without a doubt one of the top 2 programmers in the class, with it being a neck and neck (friendly) competition between me and this other guy. This being so, when a call came into the school asking if they had any willing programmers to help with a small project, they asked me if I was interested (the other guy wasn't too much of a people person) and I said yes. The project was one guy (who we will call Paul) who wanted a chess program developed to help blindfolded chess players memorize the spaces on the board or something like that. I am still not really sure, but the program is in a working state now so that's all that matters.

Anyways, weeks go by as I work on this project in my spare time, until one Friday, as I am driving around a parking lot at around 11:00 at night looking for my friends party, I get a call on my phone from Paul.

The phone call starts off how all the others have, with him explaining some more about the details of how he is securing the website, and how the program will be launched and implemented, listing some features he needs implemented, saying how he's seen the year 3622, before closing out the call with a few notes on what's needed to get the web server provider.

My phone was on speaker up on my dash, and by this point my friend had come out to the car and gotten in my passenger seat waiting for me to finish up the call. As he struggled to contain his laughter at the fact that I was working for a guy who thinks he is a time traveler, I asked what he meant by the fact that he "has seen the year 3622." I thought I misunderstood him, and jokingly asked something along the lines "like, did you travel to the future or something?" He took this question rather head on and clarified that no, he did not travel forward in time, but was rather born in 3622, and has come BACK to take advantage of the technological age, before computers become so sophisticated that they write their own code, and no profit can be made from programming.

At this point my friend choked on his cigarette and had to leave the car due to his spontaneous eruption of laughter. I tried to keep a straight face and finished out the phone call as fast as I could.

I only talked to him one time since then, and am trying to finish the program as fast as I can so I can be done with it. I would have dropped the project right after that call, but as it was more or less a request of my technical school, I didn't want this to negatively affect them.

So here I am, still working for a guy who thinks he's from the future.

EDIT FROM THE ACTUAL FUTURE: I never spoke to this guy again. I still have the code sitting on my hard drive in 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hacking Bitsy to run AI PT. 1: Getting to know Bitsy

Image
Click to play game I'm finishing out my last year of college and since I don't have any required courses left in my Comp Sci major, one of the classes I am taking is a game design course. It's an "Intro to game design," course, and as such it's focusing more on the "design," aspect, and less on technical skills. For example: Our last project was to make a non-digital version of a video game so we turned Mario Kart into a board game (which kicked major ass btw). It's a really fun course and I'm having a blast! Anyways, our current project is to design our own game. Since the course is mainly a freshman course and a lot of the other students haven't had any programming classes yet we are limited to really basic game creation tools. Introducing...(drumroll) BITSY! Enter Bitsy . Bitsy is a simple game engine and editor that allows you to make fun little games centered around conversations and picking up items. There's no
Read more

Hacking Bitsy to run AI PT. 2: Ghosts N Stuff

Image
Click to play game Welcome to the second part where I will be going over the actual AI / game programming, and how I got it to interface with Bitsy. If you haven't read the first part, you can find it here Communicating between Bitsy and our Code. This game uses the standard start/update function convention (named pStart() , and pUpdate() respectively in the code). I lodged the pStart() function call right after load_game() in the startExportedGame() function. so that it is called first thing, but also after all the game data has been initialized. It's job is to simply set up our own game variables and objects. Then I called the pUpdate() function in two places. Once at the end of pStart() in the form of a "setInterval" which is set to update every 300 miliseconds, and a special world.player.update() (more on this in a second) was forcefully stuffed into Bitsy's updateInput() function to update the player position every time a key is pres
Read more

Write Ups

Nobody but porn bots read this blog anyways, so I don't think they will mind if I change things up a bit. For my next few YouTube tutorials I am going to try to do a Write-up along side the video and see how much time that takes. If it takes too long, or not that many people are reading them, I will probably stop, however I'm interested to see how it turns out. I'll still probably finish up my Accountability posts this weekend with a really quick summary, and post a little more random stuff about freelance work and life. If you are an actual human, and read this blog, let me know XD
Read more