Anthony Wang
98eff11645
4.4 KiB
| title | date | description | type | tags | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Career Mistake | 2023-01-07T02:42:19Z | A short story about the worst mistake of Gerrit FFFFFF's career | post |
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is not coincidental and you should sue me. The characters are based off of those in Intro to Python.
As a young boy, Gerrit FFFFFF always had a knack for math. While other kids his age dreaded the dull tedium of math class, Gerrit dreaded it even more. The endless hours of learning about fractions or some basic algebra that he had self-studied long ago... Gerrit knew that when he grew up, he wanted to become a math teacher to finally put an end once and for all to the horrors of math class by tearing down the curriculum and rebuilding it so it would actually be remotely interesting.
In college, Gerrit majored in education and minored in mathematics, preparing for a future of revolutionizing math education. Unfortunately, his friends weren't so enthusiastic. "Gerrit, you got to ride the latest hype wave in San Silicono! If you join a startup now, you'll be a millionaire by the time you drop out of college!" they said excitedly, thrilled to shill their favorite tech startups. Gerrit, being an impressionable and impressed young man, knew zero programming (in fact, he knew less than zero programming, because he required more time than the average Joe to learn it), joined his friends on their career mistake and joined a startup called Gerrit, which was developing a fledgling web-based code collaboration tool also called Gerrit. Gerrit (the company) was thrilled to have someone named after the company join them, so Gerrit (the person)'s career started out with a blast! Even more fortuitously, Gerrit's last name, FFFFFF, was what all the Gerrit (the company) developers said when they were debugging code.
As time went on, Gerrit (the person) realized that his impulsive career choice wasn't in fact a mistake. It was a tough job. Gerrit had the opposite of a knack for programming and he had put in hundreds of hours a valiant attempt to learn it. On the other hand, Gerrit (the company) was skyrocketing! Ecstatic, he quickly dropped out of college and became a Gerrit developer full-time. His friends on the other hand weren't so lucky (especially since they weren't named Gerrit) and the startups they had joined had lost of their money and crashed and burned.
Soon, Gerrit (the tool) was having performance problems due to being written in Python (a language that Gerrit (the person) still had a lot of trouble understanding), so Gerrit (the company) held a meeting to brainstorm a solution. Gerrit (the person) suggested rewriting the entire thing in assembly, and everyone applauded the genius of the idea. Gerrit (the person) thus began the drudgery of sinking hundreds more hours trying to learn yet another programming language, assembly, and Gerrit (the company) began the Gerrit (the tool) rewrite.
Eventually, Gerrit (the company) caught the eye of the gargantuan G, Googol, and the Gerrit (the company) executives began negotiating an aquisition with Google. A few weeks later, everyone celebrated the purchase and Gerrit (the company) became part of Googol, Gerrit (the tool) became a Googol product, and Gerrit (the person) became a Googoler. However, Gerrit (the person) was the only one sad about the purchase. He had made a big career mistake. He wasn't making millions. His salary had stayed the same, even with all he that had contributed to Gerrit (the company).
The next day, Gerrit (the person) announced his resignation from Gerrit (the company) and became a high school math teacher at LHWHS. The job was tough at first, but rewarding. He loved impacting the lives of so many kids and finally showing them the beauty of math. The school admistration also made him teach AP Computer Science, mainly because he was the only teacher there who actually knew what a CPU was.
One day, Billiam Wender, Gerrit FFFFFF's third-brightest math student, asked him about his experiences being a math teacher and Gerrit launched into the story you are reading right now. As the story approached the present day, Billiam asked curiously, "I don't get it. Why aren't you a programmer anymore?"
Gerrit FFFFFF replied, "Well, I never got arrays."