Oh holy mother of crap, my job sucks. It sucks the big wazoo right now. It's hard to explain exactly what's wrong without sucking the life out of each and every reader, but I'll try.

The company I work for makes gigantically complex software that it then sells to other corporations so that they can be 1% more efficient in how manufacture plungers or make doodads or whatever. For the most part I work on small graspable parts of this machine. There are other parts that are not so small, not very graspable, and exceedingly important.

One of them is called something like the Computerized Runtime Application Processor. It was designed by a bunch of smart people, and then written by some slightly less smart people, and then all of those people left the company.

Computer programs, as we all know, do zillions of things per second. They plot trajectories to Mars, and predict hurricane paths, and generate Britney Spears songs. The Computerized Runtime Application Processor, however, doesn't work quite so quickly. Rather than performing millions of operations per second, it performs about one. One per second.

As it turns out, one of our customers, let's say the plunger manufacturer, needs to make 6000 plungers an hour. That's about two per second, or roughly twice as fast as the Computerized Runtime Application Processor (man, that's hard to type. I wish it had an acronym) goes.

Right as this customer started to go ballistic, someone not smart at all looked around and decided that I would be a good person to own this piece of software. Me and one of my coworkers. Us.

First, I looked for a knob. I was hoping there was some knob set at "1" and I could twist it up to "2" or maybe "11". No such luck. Then I rebooted the computer and tried again. Nope. Then I was pretty much out of ideas. Meanwhile, the Computerized Runtime Application Processor, which is essentially a giant house of cards, has started to crumble. I'm standing inside it.

So, that's why TODAY I decided to start sniffing around for a new job. I browsed some online ads and networked a bit. Although I'm way too much of a chicken to follow through on this effort, it gives me solace just to look around. If things get much worse, I'm going to head down to one of those parking lots here in the city where day laborers gather, looking for work.

"Java!" I'll cry, "Java programmer! SAVE MEEEEEE!"