It seems I’m programming for the long run. The big boss at our office told me that he had asked HR to prolong my current contract for three months, so I’d be working until April, but there’s a good chance it could be extended further for a total of nine months. My case is tricky, because I can’t speak Basque (and I will never get that certificate; even if I remotely intended to get it, I barely passed Basque even in school). In any case, when my boss got the news from the head of HR that my extension had been prolonged, he seemed quite enthused, but I thought, “Why would anybody want me for anything?”

This couple of weeks that I’ve been programming in an office otherwise filled with regular computer technicians has been far calmer than the rest of the six years I’ve worked here. I need calm, given that stress literally landed me in the ER at least a couple of times, one of them possibly causing me a small stroke (I’m still waiting for someone to call me to schedule an MRI). When I’m programming on my own, I’m in charge of structuring the whole thing, figuring out how a real-life problem could be turned into a programmable system; working as a paid programmer for a company, I just program whatever I’m told. It usually involves reworking the same stuff over and over, but what do I care? I’m a wage slave.

Of course, all this stuff is far removed from what I actually intended to do with my life. Growing up, I wanted to be a comic book artist. A bit later, I wanted to be a writer. More accurately, I wanted to produce interesting stories and be paid for it so I wouldn’t need to spend my limited time on this Earth (and presumably in any other planet) by doing things I didn’t feel like doing. However, realistically, as an ethnic European man that doesn’t hate his own kind, and that doesn’t have connections on top of that, I’m pretty much fucked when it comes to getting published traditionally.

I recall a relatively famous case in Spain a few years back, when an author with a female name won a prize supposedly based on the quality of the book, but it turns out that the author was actually three dudes. There was talk of revoking the award. Surely the book was judged on its merit, right, not because it was written by a woman? But the reality is that those dudes chose a female pen name because in this day and age, that made their book far more likely to be published.

Anyway, I thought recently about the last times I worked professionally as a programmer. You see, before I landed a job in the public sector, I only worked for private companies. My experience there taught me that it wasn’t for me, mainly because they didn’t want someone like me. Private companies seem to be mostly about fitting in, while in the public sector, you have to screw up severely to get fired. Fairly often, some of my coworkers keep yapping like school boys during recess, and you’re seen as the one with a problem if you have anything against it. In turn, my last programming job at a private company ended because a supervisor believed that I wouldn’t fit in with the team. Note that I had given them six months of my life for free as part of an internship through an institution that handles autistic people, so they knew what they were getting. My direct boss at the company, with whom I had been handling technical matters, argued with the supervisor, but it seems that the supervisor didn’t care about performance. That was the same supervisor that often had all the team seated around the table during breaks, listening in silence to her talking about her private life. It wasn’t the first job experience of that kind I had, so I wasn’t surprised. Still, I remember the HR woman who gave me the news telling me that I should be proud I had programmed the intranet for the company. Yeah, why don’t you spit in my face directly, lady?

The best chance I had at making it as a programmer in a private business was right after the 2008 crash. Somehow I got a job at a big name company of the province (or even the country), with its own multi-storied building in the Zuatzu business park in Donostia (same business park where the protagonist of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked works, but a different building). I didn’t like the job itself, which involved putting together the HTML and CSS of a website, as well as programming it in PHP or ASP, but that’s the kind of stuff you usually do as a programmer unless you’re engaged with very particular projects, and for those they often demand a college degree. I couldn’t get through even the first semester of college due to my inability to deal with numbers, that borders dyscalculia.

Anyway, I worked from nine to half past five, if not longer, with an hour and a half of lunch time that you were often expected to spend with teammates for informal reunions. I’m autistic, so dealing with people drains me horribly. I often fell asleep on the train. Once, I was so out of it that I even took the train in the opposite direction, and I realized it about forty minutes later, when I woke up in the middle of the province. Most of the time, when I managed to get home, I just felt like sleeping. I was beyond miserable. My life alternated between stints as a hikikomori and miserable stretches of jobs, some unpaid, so I dealt with suicidal ideation very often. I recall one time that my father entered my bedroom and I had passed out while eating chips: I was slumped on the chair with bits all over my chest, and for a moment my father thought I was dead. If only.

By the end of my time working there, they had started pressuring me to work overtime. My supervisor offered to drive me home in her car. I hate being driven around by virtual strangers, as that prolongs the torture of having to deal with people, so I never agreed. It was the kind of place where if you refused to work overtime, you pretty much had no future in the company. Curiously, when my six months contract was coming to an end, they told me that the following week, they planned to have me working on whatever else. I said that I wasn’t going to continue working there: my contract ended on Friday. They told me that they had planned to extend it, but I refused. I was so miserable that I simply didn’t want to remain there any longer. One of my bosses, annoyed, said that I should have given them a fifteen-days notice, but I said that I doubted it, because the end of my contract was already set. Pretty sure they’re supposed to give me the choice to extend my contract with some advance. I was also earning close to minimum wage, so it’s not like I was in the mood for anything. In any case, a couple of hours later I was called into a meeting by a boss of my immediate boss. She was an attractive woman in her mid-to-late twenties. She told me that she had “fought” for me to get me a higher wage, but added, in a sort of “threatening” manner, that it would involve more responsibility. I didn’t want to keep working there, and I particularly didn’t want more responsibility, so I refused. I still remember clearly how the young woman’s smile dropped. Why go through such trouble trying to keep me there, anyway? And do people actually want more responsibility? Is it for the higher wage or something? I can’t imagine why someone would want harder and more stressful tasks to do at a job that you don’t want to be involved with in the first place.

The sole thing I regret of not spending more time at that company is that I had a crush on one of the workers. I wouldn’t go as far as call her a coworker; there were like forty people in that large office, and I had no clue what she did. She was a beautiful, kind redhead who was dating another employee. You still remember these things, it seems; I have a picture in my mind of that young woman seated at her workstation and looking up at me with beautiful eyes and a smile that I likely didn’t deserve. She must be like forty now. I bet that if I reach my eighties, I’ll still recall these still photos of beautiful girls from my youth.

After I walked out of that office building for the last time, I recovered by remaining unemployed, and probably doing very little of anything, for a few months. Perhaps it was one of those periods in which I showered once a week, if even that. Ultimately, whatever. The older you get, the more memories you amass, even if, as in my case, you try to control what you are exposed to, just in case I end up merely feeding awful stuff for my OCD to exploit via intrusive thoughts.

Abrupt ending.