People think programmers are extraordinary. They think that they’re ingenious hackers who make robots come to life, send astronauts to the moon, and automate everything, simply with the snap of a finger.

From my experience, being a programmer is nothing like that at all. It’s filled with stress, tears, and an unbearable amount of frustration when nothing goes your way.

The day for me started at 8:00 AM. I woke up feeling the weight of years of sleep deprivation on my shoulders. Sluggishly, I peeled off my blankets, grumbling incoherent phrases about hating Mondays and wanting to go back to sleep. Who knew that sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time would have adverse effects on your sleep schedule?

I stumbled over to the bathroom sink, and started brushing my teeth as if I was a robot. For a few minutes, I stood, engaged in a staring contest with my reflection, aware of nothing else but the sound of brushing and running water. I paid no mind to the noise of the streets below me, nor the phone alarm in my room that I forgot to turn off.

Still in a sleepy daze, I headed into my kitchen, and listlessly poured myself a bowl of corn flakes, nearly spilling my milk all over the counter. I spooned cereal into my mouth, and as each spoonful entered my mouth, another complaint about my life slipped into my mind..

Why do I have to work from 9-5 just to be able to survive? Stupid money. Stupid work. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought.

After throwing on my wrinkled clothes, I forced my body to open the door, head into the hallway, and push the elevator button. I stood still, watching the red number as it gradually increased. Ding. The doors parted and I stepped inside, trying to make sense of what I would do today. Somehow, my mind found its way back to the complaints that were bottled inside of me. I had almost counted thirty of them when the elevator dinged again and, lo and behold, I was on the bottom floor. 

I stepped outside, and had to squint to see where I was going through the thick glare of sunlight covering everything.

Walking down the streets of New York is always the thing that wakes me up during the day. Every time I walk out those doors, I hear the cacophony of cars, feel the wind in my face, and see the hustle and bustle of hundreds of other pedestrians on their daily commutes. The sidewalks are always littered with old soda cans, McDonalds bags, and cigarettes. You’d think that I would have gotten tired of it after 10 years of being here, but that’s exactly what’s special about living in NYC. 

Soon enough, I arrived at my building, a small company called Hyve. Even after working at the firm for so long, I still questioned why such a small company would buy a massive skyscraper in the middle of New York. Luckily, I was able to memorize the route to my cubicle by heart. 

The last door was like a portal to a different dimension. As soon as I opened it and stepped through, I was immediately reminded of the overwhelming monotony of my workplace. Everywhere I looked, I saw white ceilings, dark gray rugs, and light gray partitions separating a countless number of cubicles. Once I found mine, I sat down, turned on my computer, and started typing.

“Hey, Phil?” My fingers were hovering right over the “ENTER” key when the stereotypical new guy on the job, Jerry, peeked over the divider. “Could you help me out here? I can’t figure out why this doesn’t work.”

“Yeah, sure!” I tried my best to exclaim, wearing a fake smile. Internally, I said to myself, “Why can’t I just do my own thing for a while?”

“Aw, thanks man!” Jerry replied, practically oozing gratitude. My exasperation lessened as I saw how innocuous he looked. I felt a little pang of guilt in my heart for disliking that guy. He seemed to repel everyone else that worked in the office, he lived alone, and he couldn’t make anything for himself to eat besides a cup of instant noodles.

What little sympathy I had immediately disappeared as I laid eyes on his impenetrable mess of code. The lack of formatting made the text seem more like an encrypted World War II message than a functional program. “So, what’s the problem?”

“Well, the compiler’s spewing about a thousand errors for these few lines of code, and I have no idea what’s going on,” he said, shrugging his arms. “So, uh, could you lend me a hand here?”

I could practically hear my brain smoking as it tried to decipher the jumble that I saw in front of me. Despite the code being nearly unreadable, the errors were like massive red flags. “So, it looks like you’re misusing the variable here,” I said, as Jerry watched in childlike awe. “Also, you missed a semicolon here, forgot a parenthesis here, and…” My list of all of the mistakes that he missed began to sound like a monologue. He corrected them, but it was evident on his face that he had no idea what he was doing. I wondered what miracle occured for him to be able to pass the job interview.

After he had fixed all of the errors I listed to him, he reran the program, and, to his shock and my relief, it worked like a charm. He stared at me like he was seeing the real Santa, then asked, “How can I get better at this?”

I pondered his question for a little bit, trying to come up with a clever answer, but nothing came up. “Just practice, I guess,” I said. 

I walked back over to my cubicle, knowing that it wasn’t that simple. “Just practicing” required years of hard work, and for what? Money? Suddenly, my phone dinged again. Instinctively, I reached for it, and on the home screen, it said “4:39”, and below that, “Today: Hyve Deadline”. Oh. Oh no. I laid my head into my hands as I mentally screamed at myself for being so stupid. I should’ve known. I could’ve prevented this. Why did I let that annoying idiot drive me off task? 

“Hey again, Phil.”

I ignored him, fearing that I would explode if I looked into his face again. Thankfully, I heard nothing from that direction again.

Soon enough, I realized that moping around wasn’t going to solve the problem. I started working, but I was never really able to focus. The whir of the fan, the typing of other keyboards, the whispers of people disturbed me, amplifying my own unyielding anxiety. I just wanted to leave so much, to leave all of this mess behind me, but what little self-control that remained told me that it wasn’t a good idea. Nearly every minute, I would run into another error. By fixing it, I would cause a second one. I slowly fell into a downward spiral of frustration as I ran into a constant cascade of bugs. I felt like the loser I was, wasting away in front of a computer, accomplishing nothing.

Click. I ran the code hopefully for the last time, and finally got the results I had spent tireless hours working for. I collapsed on my desk in relief. My eyes, nearly about to pop out of their sockets, were almost unable to make out any details in the empty room after staring at the computer monitor for so long. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my desk clock. It was 1:27 A.M. I had to get up at 8:00 again tomorrow. I just hoped that I would be able to get at least five hours of sleep.

I walked back from work in the silent darkness of the night, only illuminated by scattered street lights. As I walked, my mind drifted away from the darkness and into frustration, towards the complete unfairness of my situation. I had done something nice for someone else, and the world repaid me by turning my day upside down. I considered my options to prevent this from happening again, and my mind came up empty. Suddenly, my mind shifted back to reality as I saw a single figure, laying on the sidewalk. At first, I thought the person was dead, but then I realized that he was just asleep.  However, this person was wrapped in paper-thin blankets on a chilly autumn night. He seemed to have close to nothing, apart from the clothes on his back and a beanie on his head. 

Why did I stop? I thought. I had probably passed hundreds of people like this one over the course of my career, but, inexplicably, my feet had picked this moment to plant themselves in the ground. I urged myself to move, but something bothered me. Here I was, complaining about my life, when I hadn’t given a second thought to how other people’s lives were. People like this person, starving, trying to make something out of nothing. Even others like Jerry, who were untalented, and putting in everything they can just to get any job. This thought slowly drifted to the back of my head as I continued my trek home.

The sidewalks that used to be filled with people were now empty, and the streets had gone silent. My mind went uninterrupted as it started to plan out the next day. However, I soon realized that there was nothing to plan out. Every day of my life was basically the same as the one before, boring and repetitive. The more I looked at that fact, the more I realized that whether it was good or bad depended on how I viewed it. Life could be boring, but at least it was reliable. As I continued my walk, I noticed that, even though it was barely perceptible, everywhere I looked seemed to shine a little brighter. As I walked into the apartment building, I felt a subtle trace of what I could only make out to be contentedness in my heart.

When I walked out of the elevator into my room, I found myself going through my daily nightly routine. This time, though, something seemed different. My heart didn’t feel as tight, my shoulders, not as tense. When I sank into the comfort of my bedsheets at last, I somehow knew that the day after would be a better day. Maybe, just maybe, my life wasn’t so bad after all.