We get up at 6:00 am every day, grab breakfast or a shower, get in the car by 7:00 and drive to the office of WonkaTech who are located in the South valley.

The working environment is horribly similar to that depicted on the BBC program “The Office”. I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, but it’s a dead-pan satire of life in an office, almost excruciatingly accurate at times… I remember working at Telcom New Zealand. Supressed memories…

We have our own office, which sounds good until you realise that we’re both squeezed into this tiny room with two desks, with what is apparently the only airconditioning vent for the whole floor. We haven’t found the thermostat yet, all we know is that periodically blasts of cold air will freeze us while the rest of the office walk around saying how hot and muggy it is.

The noise from the rest of the floor is distracting.

As for the work that we’re doing: We’re maintaining and enhancing a Sales Order application written in FoxPro for Windows 2.6, apparently authored by a large succession of monkeys. Shakespeare it ain’t.

It’s fragility and tendancy to crash is a textbook case of why people go around bad-mouthing FoxPro. I get annoyed because they really should be bad-mouthing FoxPro programmers. Do you know why there isn’t a “FoxPro for Dummies” book? It’s because no-one would have bought it – FoxPro has a fairly gentle learning curve, allowing the afore-mentioned monkeys to pass themselves off as database application developers.

We have yet to prove that we can knock this thing into shape. I’m hoping we’ll do that next week.