Yesterday I congratulated myself on my memory.

Actually, that was just a little piece to boost my own morale because this week I have discovered just how easy it is to forget things.

You see, I used to be a programmer.  I was a cracker at COBOL which must have been one of the worst languages ever written.  I then moved on to Interwebby shit like PHP and MySQL, which I used for years.  When they fucked me out offered me early retirement, I set up my own little business doing the same stuff – coding and databases.  Fuckit, but I used to churn out the code faster than an express train!  I even taught the subjects.  I gave up a few years ago simply because I preferred to do nothing than to pump out thousands of lines of shit for other people.

Last week I had an idea for a little programme.

It was a simple idea to shift some data around a database, to reformat it slightly and to remove duplicates.  I reckoned it would take a couple of hours.

It took me a week.

I had forgotten everything right down to the most basic level.  I browsed through some of my ancient coding which I found and it was a completely foreign language [though it worked perfectly].  I hardly understood a single thing I had written.

So I have spent the last week wearing out Google looking for hints and snippets, banging them onto the server and watching my little programme crash in flames.  I would fix one error and another one would pop up in its place.  It was a fucking nightmare, but I persisted.

It's working perfectly now.  I just hope it keeps working.

But then it occurred to me that the reason I remembered my complicated journey yesterday was possibly because I had been exercising the old Grey Matter so much?

Every cloud has a silver lining!