Heh, so I’ve been putting off writing the next entry in the series for a few days. It’s not because the contents of this particular month are tough to recall and put into words–far from it. I’ve just been distracted lately. Anyway, I’m here, lying in bed with my laptop, feeling relaxed and ready to pour my mind out once again. Being that I am typing on my laptop, there may be more spelling errors than usual. I apologize in advance. :hehe:

**Winter 2003**
Back when I was with EC, I really enjoyed what I was doing. Working with Perl and doing general scripting was actually pretty fun. It sort of reminded me of those high school days when you didn’t worry too much about programming in some structured manner or about inheritance and the like. No, back then you just programmed in brute force spaghetti fashion and just made sure that what you programmed did what was advertised. I mean, if you consider those Perl scripts that I was creating, it’s not like they were mission critical or had to be perfectly efficient. Anyway, by the end of term, I kind of wanted to return to do the exact same stuff. When I signed the sheet saying that I wanted to return, that was what the expectation was.

At some point in Fall 2002, I was informed that I had to compete for the position again. After some consideration, they said that they wanted to put me in a web development position that had nothing to do with Perl. Nope, it was more of the tedious type stuff that they had the other guys do before. I wasn’t entirely pleased. No. I signed on to work with Perl. I wasn’t going to accept anything else. It almost sounds stubborn if I put it that way, but honestly, I did not deserve do be misled (no one does, really). The job conditions changed. Simple as that. So, I decided that I wouldn’t return. Now, this all happened late in the co-op process for the term, meaning that I had missed a huge load of excellent jobs. I admit, I was worried.

With Perl as a new playing card, I applied to many jobs that required the skill. It wasn’t long before I picked up a technical writing job for Genesis. I was part of yet another team of four co-ops, basically doing checking tech docs. Somehow, I got singled out once more. Just like in EC, I didn’t really do what the other co-ops were doing. Instead, I was scripting out Perl scripts to help with the whole tech writing team. The job was pretty relaxed–but mostly because no one else had a clue on how to anything related to what I was doing. That being said, it also sucked because the team as a whole was off-balance. Even though I was often unoccupied, other people were burdened with stupid workloads. Anyway, the people in general were alright. The company perks were OK at the time. You know, I seriously don’t remember much about work this term. I think that’s just because of the other events going on in my life at the time.

March was the scheduled move in time for our new house. Most of the neighbourhood had already moved in. We were among the last people for this first phase of housing. Man, the moving process was absolutely the worst moving experience I had ever experienced. To be fair to the movers though, we were totally unprepared for the move. I will blame that on my parents.

Also, besides the move, that was when I got my big injury.

I was flexing my leg and basically squeezed so hard that I pulled my knee cap out of its proper location. I collapsed in a heap of pain. It took a while to heal, but heal it did. It took even longer to get my leg back to full strength. As is common in my family (so the stories go), the day after the accident, I showed up at work thinking that I could actually do stuff. My boss had to tell me explicitly to go home before I actually decided to get proper rest. It shows a level of tenacity that doesn’t appear often, if only because opportunities to prove myself don’t arise all that often.

Lastly, this term was when the whole SARS outbreak made big headlines. Looking back on my entries for April 2003, I find it interesting that it takes times when the community is in some sort of distress for me to start reflecting on my heritage. It seems that it still holds today.