Silver Cup

It was the most expensive and the cheapest 'leaving the company' gift I had ever received. Most expensive if you consider only the cost of the thing itself. Cheapest if you consider the timing - one week before my options vested... The kind of gift that punches you in the chest, breaks a few ribs and releases a metric fuckton of unwanted adrenaline.

"Thanks for all your friendship and support over the last 4 years, 11 months and 23 days. I've never worked in a place with such team spirit." Fuckers. I'd show them. Six months from now they'd all be calling me up looking for jobs.

I placed the cup in the box with my other belongings. That morning I'd printed out the entire OOXML doc spec on company stationery. I had to go find a bigger box. No-one asked me what was in it or offered to help me carry it, which was a blessing and a curse. When I got home I was gonna write the best OOXML compatible word processor in the world, then I was gonna release it for free on the internet, sit back and wait for my sweet revenge. They'd never know what hit them.

That was 14 months ago.

It's not the easiest doc spec to decipher... I started with text editing, printing, pagination, etc, and figured I'd work my way down from there. That plan sucked. Six months in I decided to change tack and reverse engineer the ODF translator which I'd stolen a prototype of before I left - another mistake. I rewrote three dlls and by the time I got smart-quotes working I realised I'd been hammering away at this bitch for a year. I still can't get fucking bold text to work properly.

Silver cup my arse.