Programming Knows No Bounds

If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, you’d think that life for a software engineer is confined to a small six by six by six foot box called a cubicle where your cubicle is just one of a hundred other cubicles which are neatly organized into larger clusters of cubicles in order to fit in a vast open space called an office.  In the air, a low roar of constant ticks and clicks originating from an army of workers pounding and clicking away at keyboards and mice.  Do you have that image in your head?  Now forget it because that’s exactly where I won’t be working.  I’ll still be developing software, but for a software startup company owned by me and a friend.  This won’t be any ordinary software startup though, it’ll be based in a city that huddles the coast on one side and is surrounded by a vast desert filled with everlasting sand dunes on the other.  The summers will extremely hot and humid, far worse than Florida summers, where the instant you step outside your door, you are blast with a moist and heavy air from the bordering gulf all while being baked in temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit creating this natural sauna around you.  Luckily for me, my job will be spent indoors with the air conditioning set at a cool and refreshing 75 degrees so that when you enter our cozy little office from outside, it’ll feel like the gust of cold air you get from when you’ve just opened the refrigerator door to grab a glass of cold lemonade on a hot and sunny California day.  Once inside the office, you won’t be too impressed.  We will be a startup after all.  The office itself will probably be similar to a 1000 square foot studio apartment minus the kitchen.  Maybe a few black generic IKEA tables functioning as desks scattered haphazardly around the office space.  Each “desk” will be accompanied with a cheap office chair that has padding that’s so thin, you can still feel the unforgiving plastic mold of the chair through it.  On some of these “desks” will be computer workstations, where the coding will be done.  From these machines comes a low whirling sound as their fans try furiously to keep their respective computers from frying.  The walls are painted white; the white everyone is introduced to when you first start up Microsoft word and are staring at new document.  Most of the office lighting comes from overhead florescent lighting, those ones that give off a crisp and bright artificial light that make the color of your shirt change like a chameleon from a dull red orange like that of a persimmon to a bright red like that on a candy cane as you step in and out of the office.  The only other lighting, the natural lighting, comes through a window that spans one of the walls facing the city.  The city towers above the desert, like an oasis of metal and glass.  Home of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, the city’s expansive landscape stretches along a straight lengthy road called the Sheik Zayaed Road much like how the major casinos of Las Vegas are all lined up along the famous Las Vegas strip.  Because of this, this city is known as the Las Vegas of the Middle East.  In case you haven’t guessed, I’ll be working in Dubai, The United Arab Emirates where the Middle East meets Western culture.