If you had entered the hardware lab during those years, you would have seen six people crammed in a room too small for their desks and the electronic test benches. There was open hardware with wires dangling in every direction. You could glimpse disks, network connectors, fibers, PCBs with components, metal chassis fitted with electronic and SCADA equipment laying around.

I was seated in the left corner when you entered the lab, my desk facing the server room door. What you would see on my desk would probably be odd in this setting. On my desk, next to all that open electronics with exposed components and dangling wires, was a huge teapot and a Japanese teacup with its saucer. There was always tea in the morning and as the day passed it was replaced by herbal tea after I understood that black tea was keeping me awake at night.

Along the teapot and teacup you would usually find my fuel. Multiple boxes of french cookies. I could eat a whole package in a day. I had kept this tradition since my first full time job. Bringing a bone china teapot at each office. This was the third time I had done that. This time, however, I went crazy.

From one teapot and one tea variant, it grew to three different teapots, each bigger than the previous and a dozen boxes of tea leaves and herbal tea. The caffeine in the tea kept me focused on debugging the hardware. Sometimes the bug fix was a single bit flip after staring and scrolling at data for hours. My brain would burn through calories like crazy and the cookies (and candy) were both a reward and fuel.

Another interesting thing about my presence in the lab was a noise. A noise you ask? Yes. A noise. You could hear it from the other end of the office floor. The noise was me slamming the desk with my fist. I did that to evacuate the occasional frustration of working on hardware. I was not conscious that I was doing it.

I was a character. My own character. Unaware of how different I was. Who brewed multiple litters of tea at their office and drank it in a proper teacup? Who gulped down packages of biscuits in the afternoon? This was all normal to me. I was myself. It was only later that I understood how odd it must’ve felt for other people. It was only later I understood that this place was somehow magical and out of ordinary. It was only later that I understood how much I would treasure these years.

I would put shards of my soul into the hardware I was building. In a sense I made them alive. I was passionate about tech and about solving problems. Nothing was impossible. I could not foresee how much I would become attached to the lab and its hardware.

From scraps of plastic, silicon and metal, I would infuse software and mold them until they were ready to be manufactured. They would then be put in their natural environment, the datacenter. Racks and racks of devices with their LED gleaming in the white rooms. I would soon discover that the more devices you had, the more strange issues you would have to fix. Until then, I watched the lights dance on the music from the hardware fans.

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Kid for today - Boards of Canada
• Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo