The Developer's Neck

The software engineer told it like this: The aftertaste of a user using your application. The reading axis. Advancing until you can scroll. Looking towards memories. Compiling code.

It happened one week that, while working from home, the developer began to notice an incredible need to turn his neck. In front of the screen, it seemed as if the letters and characters wanted to rotate. The developer's wife looked at her husband strangely, they compared their monitors and saw that both were perfectly aligned. But the developer still felt that the icons, the images, even the form buttons were spinning without spinning, that is, the icons and the rest were static, but not really.

They are not static, the developer assured us, something makes them fall, something attracts them.

The developer started to suffer from neck pain, increasingly, progressively, in such a way that he could not work well and could barely sleep. His wife offered to switch sides of the bed. The developer accepted. He therefore decided to put an end to his discomfort. He slightly rotated his monitor screen until he felt in a comfortable posture. Finally, the icons were static. He could work calmly and sleep in peace, on a new side of the bed.

The key is the neck movement, the developer continued, they can say yes with words, but if they move their neck from side to side, it means no.

Well, the joy was short-lived. The developer noticed the pain returning anew, a sad feeling, as if summer was ending. He still had that need to turn his head to correctly see the content of the screen. He would have to rotate the monitor a little again, he could switch sides of the bed again, but what would happen the next day, and the day after?

The loop only works at the beginning and at the end, states the developer, the loop is lost in the middle of everything.

And so, when the developer kissed his wife he also turned his head excessively, when he drank coffee or exercised by the river. Increasingly he had to rotate his neck to chase away the pain, and night returned on a new side of the bed, and dawn returned to rotate the monitor.

It was an unsustainable situation.

I decided that I don't want to cross the sea, concludes the developer, I was born in the countryside, you know?

And it happened that the developer inherited some lands. And he traveled to the countryside, and there, far from the rotated monitor, he began to program drones and automate tasks in dryland farming. Together with his wife, they rode bicycles through the fields, and they only turned their necks to give each other a few kisses, and they enjoyed the flowers in spring and the stones in winter.