A
damaging and
worrying disease is
prevalent, nay,
rife within the
computer industry today.
Once it takes hold it can destroy the life of the programmer who will find himself powerless to stop it.
The disease centres around one major symptom:
The sufferer will find he has no concept of time - He will not be able to say with any degree of accuracy, how long something will take.
After 5 years of extensive research I can confirm what spouses, SO's and friends of computer programmers all over the world have suspected for years. Working with computers tends to be unpredictable, and computers themselves have long been acknowledged to have no respect for Regular Time, - but I can finally reveal that this tendency towards unreliability is highly contagious, and passes from the machine itself into the person programming it.
Once that person has caught the elastic time disease they are doomed to a life of chronic underestimation of timeframes.
The disease has the most devastating effect when it permeates the personal life of the programmer in question (if they are lucky enough to have one) whereupon they will incur the wrath of their loved ones by being constantly late for things, missing holidays, nights out, birthdays and even anniversaries.
In its most chronic stages - after a particularly long time in the industry, towards a milestone or deadline, and when "crunching" or finishing a project, the elastic time disease requires sufferers partners to use a formula to translate the time at which their SO is due home from work. That formula is outlined below.
The Computer Programmer One -Way Elastic Time Theory
Computer Programmer One-Way Elastic Time = Regular Person Time + (but NEVER - ) any number of hours, days or weeks;
or;
CPOWET=RPT+ANY NUMBER.