Image by Leon Macapagal from Pexels
A story about an introvert’s life in an extroverts world
You may remember these lyrics from an old American movie called The Wizard of Oz.
The story of a girl in Kansas who dreamed of a life full of color and friendship, but what if this story told a different story?
A story about an introvert’s life in an extroverts world and his journey through it to find his true home.
That’s what Wilson was facing as he was driving home from his 9–5 commute in Wichita, Kansas.
Image from World Atlas
As a software engineer, Wilson had seen numerous debugging programs, had worked closely with hardware engineers, and studied Java under the close supervision of his superior.
Unlike his colleagues, Wilson liked to take his time. His passion after all, was meticulously reading through scripts to get to the heart of a code’s task.
In the modern time period though, meticulous and slow work was not a priority. What was a priority, was clocking in and out at 5PM after finishing the day’s work of reviews, sorting documents, and other tedious tasks that — if Wilson wasn’t able to get them done in one day, he would have a backlog of tasks for the next day.
Knowing that he needed to hurry, Wilson put aside his thoughts of slowing to study his work, to look over the next set of requirements he needed done for his next task.
Life wasn’t always like this…
Summer, 1990
Wilson was hurrying the syrupy pancakes in his mouth, eyes gleaming with excitement.
“Remember that school starts next week dear!” His mother called after him, not surprised to see Wilson sprinting up the stairs to his bedroom.
As soon as Wilson reached his computer, he called his one and only friend Adam for some advice.
“Does the CPU socket come before or after the Fan Connector?”
Adam responded, “Bro it’s always after.”
“Thanks,” Wilson responded. Finishing up his repairs to his motherboard before turning it on, a set of code before him.
It was his dream to finish this Pac-Man inspired game since he had played it with Adam at the arcade.
“How’s the game progress going? I have a series of inputs we can try.” Adam suggested.
“Great, I’ll use that.” Wilson beamed through the phone. The game was nearly complete, a project these 15 year olds were dying to get done.
While the coding had been difficult at first, it was a passion project that brought the two friends even closer together during that summer vacation.
Present day
Wilson smiled, remembering when coding used to be a fun hobby for his best friend and him. Days were slower in Summer, without that time away from school, he wouldn’t have learned Javascript so quickly and been able to intern at community college at only 18 years old.
“Buddy, I need these series by 4 PM.” Tom rushed by Wilson, placing it on the desk and sprinting off before Wilson even registered him.
Turning around to see Tom already around the corner, Wilson sighed and glanced through the 15 pages of code to debug. Placing it on the scanner, he ran it through his program that required mostly a good CPU than brains to get done. Though there were some manual tasks to do as well.
4 PM
Anxiety was written all over Wilson’s face. Tom was going to come by any moment and he had this last line of code that wasn’t scanning!
Wilson suddenly got up and started pacing, knowing he couldn’t do anything until the CPU cooled down enough for the code to go through.
After what seemed to be an eternity, the CPU revved, making Wilson glance up in surprise as the computer screen lit with, “Debugging complete.”
Wilson gave a long sigh, but before he had finished relaxing his nerves, Tom came running in asking with urgency, “Do you have it?”
Wilson knew what “it” was, and replied, “Here’s the thumbdrive, all good.” Tom barely gave a nod before running around the corner again, leaving Wilson feeling unsatisfied with the anxiety he had just experienced.
Taking a small walk around the perimeter of his office, Wilson began thinking in deep thought, when suddenly a text came through.
“Hey man! Meet you at the pub tonight, gonna catch some drinks with the guys.”
Wilson put his phone in his pocket feeling even more agitated. Then with a slight realisation, he started reflecting over his life.
The best I’ve ever felt was with Adam, which is funny considering that he was the only friend I had during school. Now? I have more friends than I can count, yet all they do is hang out at the pub.
What happened to coding being fun? All I’m doing is rushing around doing tasks that mean nothing to me. The only reason I was hired was because I know Javascript, not because I enjoy doing specific projects with it. And the guys don’t even want to talk about coding either.
Wilson started thinking about the time he tried bringing up a debugging project he had done a week ago, but Roland had brushed it off, saying,
“Hey what are we here for?” With a shake of his glass he added, “Leave work talk for work and drinking for the pub, alright?”
That confession, despite Wilson already knowing that fact whenever joining them every weekend, made a sudden difference to how Wilson saw his work.
I’m not passionate about coding like I used to be, Wilson thought.
2 weeks later
Thump
“Here’s my resignation letter sir,” Wilson stated, giving a wide smile at his superior.
His superior looked up, seeing the happy smile on Wilson’s face, narrowed his eyes. “Why now? You might be getting a raise soon if you stay. What made you leave?”
Wilson adjusted his tie, giving himself a second to think before answering, “I’m starting a solopreneur business coding apps with an old friend. It’ll be a start-up, but frankly, I’m leaving because I’m going after my passion.”
His superior nodded, having a solemn face he only replied with, “Remember that you’ll need to go through the whole interview process again if you decide to come back.”
A sudden memory came through Wilson’s head of how tough it was to get this position in the first place, but the second it came in he swept it out, replying, “I know sir.”
2 years later
After a long few years of relying on savings, having multiple doubts, but mostly happiness, Wilson had partnered with Adam to establish his own business for designing apps.
These were apps that weren’t designed to be the most popular, but were aimed at helping both of them reignite their passion of coding and solving problems that both of them thought needing fixed.
Even though Adam hadn’t heard from Wilson in 10 years, since the year that Wilson had moved and become an intern at a community college, he was happy to be building alongside his old buddy again.
It was only after Wilson and Adam decided to become partners, quit their jobs at their commute, and rely on the money they saved to start their own business, did they feel satisfied with both their friendship and what they were doing in their life.
No more were the pub talks about drinking and prohibiting work from their conversations. Now, Adam and Wilson would invite each other to their places to discuss coding while also coming over to work on their projects — all without a cubicle or office to stay at.
During this change, both of them moved from their separate locations in the US to Greewood, South Carolina, called by locals the Emerald city.
Even as introverts, the two were able to discuss with investors to get their apps in a start-up and hire employees to help manage their workload — all to help them work on what they really wanted to,
solving problems with code.
This was a story I coined one day when wondering about the phrase, “There’s no place like home” and what that really means for people, including introverts and extroverts.
While I didn’t define who was introverted & extroverted in this story, the differences with introverts that may have been noticed, were their attention to detail when working without the need to be around a lot of people.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, if this resonated with you I’d love to know!