Today I heard probably the

Today I heard probably the most sensible statement I've heard since I started this job with Nagra/ntl. I wish I could remember the exact wording, but the gist was this:

    "Let's do x, y and z so that we can automate a lot of this stuff
    and do a lot less work."

My heart soared - this was absolute music to my ears. For me the whole magic of computing is that you can elimate tasks. Not reduce them, not delegate them, but elimate them. Imagine I offered you the following deal: "You can spend an hour a week cleaning your house/doing your ironing/paying bills for the rest of your life, or you can spend the next two days building something that will do it for you. Forever."
Which would you choose?

Personally I hate cleaning. I hate ironing. I pretty much hate anything repetitive¹, because life's too short to do the same thing twice. And so for me computers take on this magical quality - they elimate repetition. And in doing so they create freedom. They can liberate us from drudgery.

I always think of the ideal computing attitude as this: "I don't work - I have a machine that does that for me."
That thought echoes a teacher/colleague/friend of mine who told me something about 5 years ago - he said that System Administration was a good job, "because if you're good at it, you don't do that much work; you've already automated it."

He was right. Did he realise though that those of us in computing are in a truly blessed position - by throwing some extra work at a problem, we can burn it away entirely. Never to be troubled by it again. Isn't that magic? Computing is the only career I can think of where the best person to employ is someone who does progressively less....

And that makes today a a very poetic one. The wisdom of an old colleague has thoughts the words of a new one, and it leaves me feeling damn good. There's a meeting of minds there. Samurais² had honour, and programmers have laziness. A special kind of laziness.

So for those many vistors to the Cafe that are in the computing industry: I encourage you to work hard on becoming more lazy.
And for those of you that bemoan your IT department: Next time you feel they aren't doing their job, phone them up and accuse them of not being lazy enough...

¹Which is why I left Aylesbury.
²No, I didn't know that was the plural either...
PS - God, if you're reading this - can you please teach me to elimate bills the way I can elimate IT tasks?