Comment by MomsAVoxell

I was young, and needed the money. A week-long contract in San Francisco, to do some contract work. Instead of a vacation.

Well, so I flew to the Embarcadero center, some late fall.

The task was to work on some audio code, and maybe networking, for a popular multiplayer cyber- tank battle game.

It was a great gig. I onboarded with another dev, who sat with me for the first 30 minutes after a few rounds, while we watched dark shapes out in the bay and tried to determine if they were submarines or whales.

Then, when it got dark, we decided to stop testing and do some work, looking out over the bay as our machines rebooted into developer modes.

After our sprint and midnight pizza, the boss came in, introduced himself, and asked me a question that kinda changed my life: “have you read Snow Crash yet?” .. it had just been released, I hadn’t gotten there yet.

“No, I brought the new 2600 with me though, you wanna .. “ .. “Stop”, he said. Walks to his office, digs through a box, gives me a brand new, fresh copy, first edition. Because of course he had a box of them.

“Don’t work on anything else until you’ve read this cover to cover”, was the directive.

“Really”, yes really ..

My onboarding colleague looked at me with an amused smirk, shrugged, and said “yeah, you gotta ..”

So I spent 3 work days and a weekend, reading it.

Get to Monday, I’m good to go. I’ll make this audio code listen to reason.

37th floor, Embarcadero like I said, I get out of the lift and .. there’s a dark mood in the room. DOOM had just hit.

Well, I’ve been living Snow Crash since the day I read it, is all I’m saying.