Given Me a Number and Taken 'Way My Name

Hi.

I'm...somewhere, doing...something, for an Uncle we'll just call...Sam...

D'oh!

This secrecy thing is new to me, so I'm gonna have to be careful. I guess I'm still free to make stuff up, and if it confuses the bad guys (although they won't tell me who those are), so much the better.

I found my place of business, on the right day no less, and got off to a great start Monday. Naturally every system connected in any way with processing me crashed at least once, from the key to my door, to the badge picture that wouldn't take, to the 401(k) that's actually a 403(b), to the new on-line security clearance request form that I won't write about for fear of offending the very people I submitted it to.

It turns out that you have to sign in in ALL CAPS on odd-numbered days and in all lowercase on even-numbered days. I think everything is right, although it wants to call me the 1Vth instead of IVth, but ya can't win 'em all.

So I got to look at the code base that I'll be working with. When he said it was sixty thousand lines, I had assumed it would be broken down into a nice hierarchy of modules spread across dozens of source files and grouped into sensible libraries, but of course it's all in one huge file.

The change history in the comments is dated in Roman numerals, I swear. All the documentation is in hieroglyphics, since the project started in MCMLXXI. I'm fighting the temptation to suggest rewriting it in a modern language, but as long as they keep throwing more hardware at the problem, maybe it will solve itself.

What else...my cell phone, which has a camera included, is banned from the facility, as it could be a leak. So I guess I can't show you all pictures of the inside of the place. To sum it up: these things are always more exciting in the movies.

I'll be sending out change-of-address letters to everybody I know as soon as I know what my new cell number will be.