A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GREEN

March 29th, 2020

Lucilius was bent forward at his desk, typing furiously in pauses.  Scanning lines of code before typing more.  Then his hands danced in a well practiced rhythm of steps across the keyboard to initiate a program.  It worked, and Lucilius sat back in relief and splendid celebration.  The project was done, complete.  Tomorrow it would go live, but the work was done and now It was time to celebrate. 

Lucilius flipped open the door of a mini fridge a pulled out a frosty bottle of champagne.  He took a picture of it and then texted the photo to a bunch of friends.

About to open this.  Meet at my place.  It read.

It was a short walk home and on the way he picked up more booze.  More champagne and whisky and wine.  When he got to his apartment building there were already a few friends gathered outside waiting for him.  They all cheered when they saw him and Lucilius raised his arms, bottle and bags in hand, taking in the good vibe. 

He didn’t even wait to get upstairs as a few more friends whistled from down the street and hurried to join the little crowd.  Lucilius put down the bag of booze and unwound the cork cage on the champagne.  A light shake and the pop sent everyone into a new round of cheers as Lucilius sprayed the wine high, splashing his own face.  He drank some and then handed it off to be passed around as he caught the door from a smiling neighbor leaving the building.  The small band began singing as they followed Lucilius up the stairs where the party grew and raged through the entire night.  They even managed to get a few police officers drunk who had been called to investigate the noise.

All in all, it was a spectacular night.

The next day, when Lucilius finally made it back to his little office space, he noticed the power cord for his laptop on the ground.  He picked it up and plugged it into his computer, which had died.

He powered it back up, and realized only then that he had not backed up any of his work.  But that wasn’t an issue, as Lucilius had built a program to automatically push changes after a certain time interval.  It was no problem. 

He logged into the back-up source to retrieve all the work and found that the project was completely gone.  He would later discover that his program that automatically backs up work had been cut short by the laptop’s dying battery between the moment when the original is replaced with the new version of work.  All in all, he now had nothing.