Monday 19 June 2017

Piss up in a brewery

Hey everybody, welcome to the Sabbatical blog! This is just a quick-fire post about the way we spend time.

As the title suggests, I went to a brewing company with some friends and sampled a selection of their delights. Hats off to that Mr Aled Parry and his drinking associates for the great plan. A good time was had by all and there was pork pie for tea and hangovers for breakfast!

The Leighton Buzzard Brewing Company were our generous hosts and while it may rather sound like we were sitting in the blazing sun in the car-park of an industrial estate, surrounded by clientele you'd expect to find drinking beer in the car-park of an industrial estate, the reality of the experience was that they also had a DJ playing music I'm unlikely to identify.

A hot grill supplied an endless quantity of sausages and burgers and the brewery provided a fine selection of beer. From the former I'd say a pulled-pork burger is a top pick, and from the latter tip my hat to the "Ninja" and the red river one and whatever that golden one was but I'll admit to the connoisseur that details might have become slightly blurred.

Organising a piss up in a brewry is an idiom in English for a task that is so mindbogglingly simple that it requires no planning at all, and day made it into the sabbatical feed not for the fact of the matter, but rather because it's how my mind works all the time. No. Not blurred by alcohol. I mean that I'm a knowledge-based thoughtworker, and the blog is chronicling the differences in different mediums.
In programming, I treat everything I know how to do as impossibly easy, and everything I don't know how to do as impossibly difficult and there is a sheer gradient between the two. When I'm sitting chilling, I'm a dreamer - the sky is the limit. Sure, I've never made a crossbow before and it's probably pretty difficult. But it's only made of stuff, right? stuff that's the wrong shape and I'm going to do stuff to this stuff until it's the right shape ... how hard can it be?
And besides, wouldn't it be cool.

I don't know if I ever made a transition from a dreamer to a wall-climber, certainly some of these mind games coming from knowing how difficult a task is. Am I more willing to fail because I don't know what I'm doing? That is a rather convenient excuse for failure. Is it because I've got nothing to lose - or nothing to prove?

"Having a stab" at something is a workplace skill that we should all retain. Not everything has to be as easy as a piss up in a brewery or so impossible we should abort mission. There is a healthy middle ground of play that isn't a bad place to be.

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