Saw this crossword clue come up the other day, “what lions use to hunt”. Got me thinking for a second, you know, about the obvious stuff like teeth, claws, all that. But where my mind really went was way back to when I was working at that software house, Dynacore Systems. Talk about a jungle.
You see, figuring out that clue felt simple compared to figuring out how things actually got done over there. It wasn’t about having the sharpest claws, it was about navigating the chaos. We had this one project, I remember, supposed to be a simple update to an old client’s reporting tool. Should have been straightforward.
The Great Information Hunt
But finding the original source code? Or even the contact person who last touched it? Man, that was the real hunt. Nobody seemed to know. The documentation lived on some ancient server tucked away in a closet, probably powered by squirrels on a wheel. Accessing it was one thing, finding someone who even remembered the login was another.
I started by asking my manager, standard procedure. He pointed me towards Janet in QA. Janet swore blind it was Mark in Development who had the keys. Mark, when I finally tracked him down after two days because he worked weird hours, insisted it was archived by the Ops team years ago. You see the pattern here?
It felt less like teamwork and more like chasing gazelles across the savanna, except the gazelles were my colleagues, and they were surprisingly good at disappearing when you needed something specific. My main tools weren’t speed or strength, but patience and just pure, mule-headed persistence. I spent more time digging through old email chains and shared drive archaeology than actually coding.
We eventually found some version of the code. Was it the right one? Who knew! We patched it up, pushed it out, and crossed our fingers. It worked, mostly. But the whole process was exhausting. It really showed how messed up things were behind the shiny corporate facade. It wasn’t about strategy or skill sometimes, just about who could endure the internal maze the longest.
So yeah, lions hunting. Sometimes I think office life requires a similar set of skills, just maybe less teeth and more tolerance for confusing directions and lost files. Wild, in its own way.
