…or, my 15 minutes of fame.
A very BIZARRE thing has happened at my company in the past month. They are about to start up another Code Academy class for 2020, and they’ve just put out the notice on our Intranet site — with Yours Truly as the cover girl.
Perhaps I should back up. About a month ago, three of us alums from last year’s class were asked to come to Home Office (The Mothership) to have photos taken to shill for the new Code Academy campaign. We got down there and discovered that, far from being a few photos, this was to be a whole photo shoot! They had us walking around the building, carrying our laptops, looking like we were on our way somewhere important. We were coached, “Talk! Just like you would in any other everyday exchange!” I turned to the other two and said, “I don’t know about you, but our meetings are all Skype…we don’t walk ANYWHERE.” They has us sit at a desk, like we were working. They had us sitting around one of those collaborative tables, as if we were discussing something of great import—again, FAR from anyone’s reality. Any of my collaborations take place with people in Chennai at 8:00 am via Skype, or with people in the building at our desks, with someone inevitably teetering on one of those ridiculous padded filing cabinets that are supposed to double as a chair. We did all have fun with the photo shoot, and I was fairly certain my two much younger fellow alums were going to be the focus of the campaign.
But, noooo…
A few days ago, someone from another Agile team came up to me and announced, “We have a bet!” I looked at her…perhaps a bet over exactly when I’m going to self-implode from my ongoing GUnit testing cluster****? She got out her phone and showed me a picture she’d snapped. “Is this you? You’re on all the TVs in the building!” I looked and there was what had to be the worst picture anyone has ever taken of me, sitting at the desk pretending to work. She continued, “We were confused as to whether or not it was you, because that’s not your desk!” I raced down to the TV by the elevator and sure enough, there I was, large as life! I checked the Intranet site and there was an equally hideous picture of me with one of the alums. She, at least, looked good. I’m not sure what’s worse—that I looked every minute of my 55 years, or that they didn’t get all the detail of the hand-knit sheep sweater I was wearing—that one I knit all through Code Academy, to preserve my sanity.
Since then, I’ve had complete strangers stop me in the hallway, exclaiming, “Oh my God, it’s you! Your picture is EVERYWHERE!” The good thing about this is that I’ve also had people ask me about the Code Academy program. I’ve been able to give them an overview of the program and tell them that it was a fantastic experience, and that I’m very happy now that I’m a developer. Hopefully all this was worth it, and there will be a lot of applicants this year.
