Has every well I've ever drilled gone dry?
Melancholic reflections on the ephemerality of modern work
It occurs to me that since I have this little space with a weekly short story that no one reads, I could also publish occasional essays that no one will read, either, perhaps on topics that are of no concern to anyone. I don’t know that it will be as clockwork consistent as the fiction (which has the advantage of having already been written), but I suspect I’ll have an additional thing or two to say each week.
Photo by Provincial Archives of Alberta on Unsplash
There are a half dozen or so songs that are guaranteed to make me cry: “Vampires” by Jason Isbell, “Love at the Five and Dime” by Nanci Griffith, “There Were Roses” by Tommy Sands, and “Where’ve You Been” by Kathy Mattea are always good for a few tears. But the one that gets me the most is “Desperados Waiting For a Train” by Guy Clark (Nanci Griffith’s duet with Guy Clark is the version that kills me, so much more so because both of these singular voices are silent now).
It’s a song about friendship and regret and loss, about grandfathers and grandsons, and about the permanent and impermanent. The opening image is a crusher:
I'd play “The Red River Valley”
And he'd sit in the kitchen and cry
And run his fingers through seventy years of livin'
And wonder, "Lord, has ever' well I've drilled gone dry?"
Oof.
I’ve only had just short of 55 years of living, and pretty easy years compared to the subject of Guy Clark’s song, and there’s still plenty of thick (if graying) hair for my fingers to run through, but it’s a sentiment I can understand.
I’ve been a software engineer for thirtyish years now, cutting my teeth on WordPerfect macros and Lotus 1-2-3 in the ‘90s, then transitioned to Lotus Notes and WebSphere Portal Server as Y2K loomed; I worked on a few Java platforms (WebSphere, Tomcat, Glassfish) before having the rug yanked out from under me and dropping me into a nightmare world of PHP. These days I’m more on the platform and infrastructure side of things, getting the opportunity to write Python scripts to simplify my work and scratch that itch to write code that I first developed in middle school writing BASIC on the TRS-80 in the corner of the math lab.
And what do I have to show for the hours and hours of coding? Not a whole lot.
There are projects where I was the primary developer that I’m still very proud of, mostly for how they solved interesting technical challenges with the tools available. For example, I had a big Lotus Notes database that got refreshed periodically from a flat file dump from a mainframe system, which required a lot of tricky parsing. And there was the CORBA connection pool that worked around a memory leak in IBM’s Lotus Notes connectors for WebSphere. And a highly configurable workflow system using SOAP and REST to integrate several different back end systems with a snazzy little Dojo front end. I managed to make the clunky Alterian content management system more flexible by leaning on its container model, and even put together a series of bash and Python scripts to keep the most horrible technical decision I’ve ever seen (choosing to run a large enterprise website on Craft CMS) chugging in spite of itself. There was seldom anything elegant about these solutions, and they often felt like Rube Goldberg contraptions just one tumbling marble or swinging umbrella from collapsing into pieces. But they solved real problems, and they allowed me to explore interesting ideas.
And how many are still in use? Exactly none.
(Actually, a few bits and pieces of the Craft system are still being used to monitor the Sitecore system that replaced it, because the monitoring tools available to me from various vendors suck, but the Craft servers themselves are dead and gone and not even remotely missed.)
A lot of dry wells indeed …
In many ways, software engineering and IT are disciplines that thrive on pumping wells dry and moving on. There’s always a new framework, a new platform, a new methodology that is going to transform the industry and reap the rewards of The Future. We’re a faddish bunch, jumping on bandwagons and surfing new trends with great enthusiasm, only to throw those things overboard at the next shiny object. Today we’re obsessed with “AI” (I’ll have more to say on that bundle of malarkey in the future …), but tomorrow we’ll no doubt have a new silver bullet for all the world’s troubles.
But this churn is not unique to IT, nor is it new. Indeed, it’s noted in one of the most poetic passages in Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto”:
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
There’s something about this state of affairs, so ingrained in modern capitalism, that grates on the soul, and is captured so painfully and eloquently in Guy Clark’s lament. That this old man is a “driller of oil wells” — engaged in the extractive and destructive economics at the core of capitalism — feels apt. (This is not to say that Guy Clark was a Marxist, nor that Karl Marx was a Texas outlaw singer-songwriter; it’s just to say that sometimes things are just dead right.)
If I were to try to spin this lament about the ephemerality of my career into something positive, I would probably try to make a case for some by-product of the project churn — teamwork, relationships with co-workers, expansion of knowledge — as being the thing of lasting value that came of the decades of work. But I will not stoop to such obvious bullshit, because certainly you, dear reader, are too smart to be baffled by it. If my work produced anything of lasting value, it was whatever the shareholders or billionaire owners of the enterprises for which I did the work converted my surplus labor into, and whatever I managed to do with the time away from my desk and with the salary I earned in exchange for my knowledge and time. The work itself amounts to naught but a whisper of breath.
Of course, the quest for solidity is ultimately a fool’s errand. “All that is solid melts into air” precisely because there really is nothing solid at all. We are simply tricked by our desire for solidity into imagining that we can make something lasting and timeless, when indeed we are always carving “vast and trunkless legs of stone” that will be swallowed up by the hungry but never-satisfied desert sands.
What is real? The imaginary kitchen that Guy Clark’s narrator spins up for one last rendition of “The Red River Valley” feels far more real than those empty oil wells, as does the love between the narrator and the old man, even though neither amount to more than a fistful of air in the end.