Posted by Jim at March 4th, 2005

For the last week I’ve been undergoing a major time crunch at one of my jobs. Essentially, I’ve been reworking a conference registration and online payment system I set up a year ago. One would think that that would be easy since I’d already figured everything out once.

Unfortunately, it was a bit of a rush job last time as well–not to mention my first time programming in php–and I saw a lot of things I could improve. Thus I’ve been spending all available hours trying to put things together.

Now though, I’m telecommuting and there’s the added wrinkle of cats. Last year, people at the office left me alone and didn’t ask me to do things for them while I was working on this. Cats are not quite as considerate.

Cats work on the assumption that if someone is sitting, they have a lap available. Computer programming always involves sitting. Thus, I can be minding my own business, trying to organize the project in my mind or solve an unexpected problem when a cat:

1. materializes seemingly out of nowhere and leaps on my lap or
2. in the case of one of my more timid cats, materializes out of nowhere and pokes me with his paw, indicating that he wants to be petted and
3. when I ignore him, leaps straight to the top of my desk,
4. balances in the small area between the monitor and the edge of the desk (blocking the monitor) and
5. then walks across the keyboard toward me, making a purring noise and inadvertantly scattering “kjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj” or “wsfddddddddddddddddddddddddddd” into random spots within my code.

It’s enough to make a person want to buy a laptop and work from coffeehouses instead.