Roy Tang

Late afternoon on Saturday, I was looking quite a bit more work ahead of me, an amount that would later prove to last into the early morning. For some reason or another, I was a bit out of sorts, not really into what I was doing. Not wanting to waste company time being ridiculously unproductive, I decided to take an early dinner break and wander around Ortigas Centre for a bit.

I suppose everyone has their off days. You know, those days when you’re not particularly sure what the hell it is you’re doing or why you’re doing it. This was one of those days. I walked around a bit thinking random odd thoughts like “I wonder what would happen if I just went ahead, took out all my cash from an ATM and vanished forever from this life?”

There are people would miss me, sure; but they’d get over it. The current project would get hit by a crisis for a short while; but they would recover in a week or so. I’m pretty sure there are far too many people in the world for the loss of one identity to have some catastrophic impact. My real concern was wondering what I would do with the new-found freedom, what kind of new life would I set up for myself. My preferences went towards any sort of normal 9-to-5 job where I could just come in, do the minimum amount of work I could, then leave as early as I can, getting a lot of free time in the process. Well, at least a lot more than I have now.

That’s ridiculous of course; I wouldn’t last long living a life where I had to spend 8 hours a day doing some inane thing like being a store clerk. No offense to those people who *are* store clerks, mind you; I’m sure there are many good reasons why they are store clerks. It’s just that none of those good reasons would be good enough for me.

The current job is actually great in that it constantly challenges me, pushing me to find smarter ways to do things, to be brilliant, to rise to the challenges. But it’s not perfect. There are periods of time where the team has no choice but to go into crunch mode. Like now. And any developer can tell you, when your team is in crunch mode, you can literally feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. Luckily, many of the devs on the current team are still hard-working and still have a bit of fight left in them, hopefully enough to see the project through. But I’m starting to feel the weight myself; I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired of a project before.

Instead of becoming a hobo, I figured I’d take a vacation after the project is done. I’ve already told the appropriate people that I’d like to take a two-week leave before moving on to the next project. But right now, two weeks seems a bit lame. I’m thinking a bit more… maybe two or three months. I don’t even care if it’s unpaid.

I mentioned this to a colleague, and she told me I’d be bored out of my wits by the end of the first week. Wow, that’s ridiculous. As long as I have electricity, I don’t think I can be bored. (Didn’t we just lose all electricity across Luzon last week? Shut up.)

I figure I’d spend one week just cleaning stuff up and sorting it. Yeah, I sort stuff, I’m geeky that way. And yeah, one week. I don’t even have a lot of stuff per se. It’s just not very organized right now.

Then I can spend some time on a hobby that I’ve neglected for the past two or three years: game development. I don’t plan to look for work in the gaming industry anytime soon, given that the current work conditions in commercial game development are a lot worse than I would be willing to tolerate. If ever I break into the gaming industry, it’s probably as an indie game developer. Anyway, right now I’d just want to finish one damn game. Before I started my current job I didn’t have enough programming experience or discipline to get it done. But now I think I can safely allot 2-3 weeks for a simple random-dungeon roguelike. After all, an experienced game programmer was able to do it in a week, I figure three times that amount of time should be enough for me.

What else would I do during this theoretical 2-3 month break? I also want to write a book. Not that I think I’m any good or anything, I just wanna give it a go. I’m not particularly good at world-building, so I’m thinking it’ll probably be some generic fantasy-type template world, and the story would be more person-centric than world-centric. So no epic world-saving sagas or anything. I’d also want to try something more science-fictiony, but I think the fantasy stuff would be easier for me first.

Rest of the time would be spent net-surfing, blog-reading, maybe twinking around with Ubuntu, WoW, Magic: The Gathering, Final Fantasy XII, etc. Maybe even some exercising.

*Sigh* it’s nice to dream of vacations. That being said, I’d probably only do a 3-4 week vacation at most. Aside from the fact that anything longer than that costs me a bit of salary, I think I’d actually miss the job and the people there. Strange, but probably true.

Oh, I eventually had dinner at Jollibee at the Megamall food court.