Challenges

Everyone has challenges in life. For the most part they're drawn out and thus not very exciting. However when you're not faced with problems it's also dull. This happens to me at work sometimes. Then out of the stagnant waters will burst some problem that I have to solve.

Suddenly I'm chasing data relationships through labyrinths, ducking and weaving around obstacles and chasing ghosts until I find the foreign-key relationship that the old manuscripts would have talked about had I had a copy of them to read.

Or I will be plodding along the seemingly repeating landscape, moving from one end of the world to the other carrying only small amounts of uninteresting goods when all of a sudden a wizard will appear and demand I solve a riddle in order to get the next bland, uninteresting item. Then a quest is launched and I have to assemble a team of different procedures with different skills and oft times conflicting personalities to complete the wizard's quest and deliver this bland object to the kingdom.

At least these challenges are defined. It’s obvious when you get this kind of problem; my eyes will widen as I feel the ground give way beneath me and I plunge into the poorly crafted pit trap that I would have noticed if I’d been paying more attention. The single drop of dew on the leaf beside me will blur into the sea of green as my neck snaps back and I watch the sky disappear. Stumbling in the darkness my heart rate will increase and I’ll find whatever source of light I can to start working out just how I’m getting out of this one.

But I always get out ok, shake myself off and maybe clap my shoes together over the garden so I don’t traipse mud through my cubicle. And if you kinda squint at my access pass, from an angle, it does sort of look like "The Blue Key".

Outside of the tower though, away from my computer where I can’t press tab to look at a map, challenges aren’t exactly harder to find. It’s just in the real world I think fiction starts to blur the facts and I can’t notice when I’m supposed to be on a mission and when I’m just walking back from lunch after buying a coke.

Life would be more fulfilling if every time I was faced with a puzzle the Pacman theme would sound and every time I solved a problem the Puzzle Bobble Level Clear would play. At least that way I would know what the hell is going on.

Comments

Zoe

No WAY! There are wizards and kingdoms and pit traps in Adelaide?! That's freakin' sweet.

wakka wakka wakka

August 22 2006 - Like
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