Family Life

Here I am on yet another business trip. This is the third or fourth week in a row that I’ve had to travel for work, and there will be more to come. There’s lots of work for me, for which I’m grateful, and this is a good customer that I’m quite happy to go the extra mile for, but it’s wearying to be away from home so much. I miss sitting down to dinner with the family, playing in the living room, putting the boys to bed at night. I know that it’s extra hard for Debbie on her own, and I feel badly for her.

This week’s work is especially onerous. It involves some efficiency improvements to an old machine of ours. The machine makes parts around the clock, and our customer wants us to speed it up. We’re also attaching an extension so it can make bigger parts. The problem is that the machine’s software was written by a (now ex-) colleague that didn’t really know how to program. The software is a huge, intricate mess, with no documentation. The user interface is a horrible jumble of poorly-thought-out messages. Sample: “The pusher failed to not retract, and it should have.” It’s accurate (in the proper context), but hopelessly confusing to the poor operator.

I have to find where I can make speed improvements in this undocumented house of cards, and hope the small changes I make don’t cause the whole thing to come crashing down. I’m scared to touch it. The machine is a critical part of our customer’s operation, and it’s delicately teetering on the brink of disaster.

A programmer’s worst nightmare.

I have two days to work on it, and I had guesstimated I’d use the whole two days to proceed slowly with extreme caution. Well, this morning I found out the parts we’d sent on ahead hadn’t arrived yet, so we’d have to postpone the mechanical upgrades untill tomorrow. This will likely delay the whole project by a day. That’s disheartening, because it’s yet another day away from home. On the other hand, I get an extra day to pick my way through the maze and try and make some sense of it. That’s a good thing.

So with nothing better to do, today I went through and documented the entire program. I feel better now I have extensive and reliable notes, but with that knowledge my gloom deepened over the magnitude of the horror and how easily I could inadvertently ruin it all.

Mulling over the day in my motel room, the hopelessness of the situation overcame me, and I fell to my knees and begged the Lord for help in understanding, in applying the right fixes, in not breaking anything. The Bible doesn’t say anything about programming industrial machinery, but it does say the Lord is our ever-present help in times of trouble. And I definitely felt I was in trouble.

With prayer came peace. We’ll see how things go in the morning. But I am not alone. I may not know exactly what I am going to do, but the Lord does. And that’s enough for me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 10:24 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.