I confess...

...I really like my job.

Actually, it sounds kind of boring when I tell others what I do. You know, I work at this software company that supports a number of danish banks. Specifically, I work in the department that develops eBanking systems.

I am the project manager of a team of 7-8 people, and at the moment we are making usability improvements on the investment side of our online bank.

Might not sound awfully exiting, but I love my job.

To me, it is the perfect mix of dealing with people and their oddities (my lovely colleagues as well our costumers - the banks), and using the mathematical/logical side of my brain to help along the analysis side of the project.

I love planning a sprint with the team, following the progress during the sprint and summing up how it went, when the sprint is over - and using the result to make our next planning a bit more precise. I like sitting in meetings, talking over solutions, and watching things come together. I like finding out what my co-workers are really good at, and I like trying to help them get even better.

I even like it when things get politically charged ... I might bitch about it, but the truth is that it just makes my job more interesting. I like learning the trade I do, and I like the feeling that I am getting more and more competent at it.

You might even say I am slightly in love with my job ... it is a combination of working with the right things, the right people and in a position that challenges me just enough to keep me on my toes. I am a lucky lady, because I go to work most days with a big smile and looking forward to the things I have to deal with.

Being a cog in this big and smooth-running machine pleases me. I know I am not changing the world, helping the poor or healing the sick - but I am as happy as a clam.

I just never want it to end :-)

Fooling fools

I am at the moment watching a show on tv, called "the power of the spirits".

In short, a man claims to have had paranormal activity in his apartment (most of the stuff rather explainable, in my opinion).

They bring in this wacky priest, who does a very obvious number of cold reading (firing off a bunch of factual questions - "I sense he is young/old/I smell tobacco/wine/have you felt thirsty/was this apartment originally two apartments" - and gets one in every 15 or so right. Every time he gets something just nearly right, the guy living in the apartment gets all awestruck. Very funny.

Then they sit down to conjure the guy to show ... nothing happens, of course, so the wacky coldreading priest "sends him across", and gives a long crazy explanation of where this assumed ghost came from.

If it wasn't so horrendous, it would be funny. If I were cynic enough, I think I'd pursue an alternative carreer. People are standing in line to be cheated.

A hole in time

For 70 years an apartment in the center of Paris stood untouched and unused.

Nobody came or went there. Just the years passing by. The dust fell, silently. No voices marred the silence, no hands separated the curtains to cast a glance outside.

Then the lady renting the apartment died, and it was opened.

Everything stood the way it was left 70 years ago .. and for the first time in many decades somebody stepped in and broke the silence.

When I read about the apartment in the newspaper yesterday, it triggered my fantasy madly. That stately apartment, left one day. Maybe a book lying on a coffee table. Perhaps a drinking glass left in the sink in the kitchen. A pair of slippers, abandoned in a corner. A hairbrush on a bedside table.

And quiet. Quiet. Quiet. The dust settling, the years passing. Soft sounds of the world passing by. Outside.

If I were a writer, I'd write a book, inspired in that abandoned apartment, quietly dusting over while life bustles around it.

It would make a fantastic, gloomy, odd story, I think.