I know what it feels like to be dead yet still alive like a wraith, or to be caught in a tar pit like a giant sloth. I feel that way in the middle of big, long, drawn out data conversion projects. Your eyes get all dry and swollen. You’re dessicated. The sun beats down on your lifeless body and you can’t feel your extremeties anymore except for a feint buzzing around the edges of your synapse where your legs used to be. The digital files have been abbreviated with cryptic names like CRTI.N06_22.ysd representing places and software that don’t exist anymore in years so far gone that the drill pads are invisible even to remote sensing probes. I can’t leave my workstation overnight because my computer needs me. I have to keep my head stuck in the machine like an iron lung and keep stoking the fires that make the innards run. I am converting drilled core data to digital format from pages that date back to days of papyrus, which was supposed to be an improvement over clay tablets but the clay tablets have a longer shelf life, something like 10,000 years…
Maybe someone will come in my office and pull this computer off my head - an intervention to save me. They might think I’m on crack but it’s actually only a DOS program. Somewhere in this mechanism little switches are reading strings of 0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,1 that are supposed to mean something like smoke signals across the valley floor to pioneers wondering what in the Hell those Indians were up to… I don’t write code, though I have been forced to do that in the past in order to save the mine. Writing code requires great concentration. I prefer to pretend I have no idea what they are talking about so I don’t have to do it… One job (not for my company - for a software company that has since disappeared deep into the tar pit about a decade ago) the data guru and I wore tin-foil hats molded to our heads to try and keep the flow of concentration focused on the issue at hand. Two people writing code, shoulder to shoulder in a crunch to make the deadline is a crazy place to be. You really have to be plugged into each other’s mainframe and keep a syncopated beat going between the user interface and the database. Beta-testing, it’s a mad mad world…
Data has come back to haunt me 10 years later and multiple companies later after I’d collected it. Sometimes, it’s been renamed or compiled or even colored differently. I suspect some versions may have been pirated from Scandinavian or Mexican or Asian or Pan American sources, but it is definitely the same data. I am quite sure of that. I recognize it immediately. I am a surgeon, dabbling in the viscera of a dinosaur from the past. Surreal. I have become a data guru with lines in my face. Back then, I was an ambitious eager core-logging kid and the target was only a prospect yet to be drilled out.
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