What began as an innocent favour for a friend ended in one of the biggest inconveniences of my …week. This mate of mine was building some software for a game that he and his friends were working on and asked me to help. He was having alittle trouble with the programming and, knowing that I’d read a few book about programming, asked me for some help. Now, this friend of mine is actually taking a video game design course. Melbourne, where we live, has a few good colleges that offer such diplomas, and since getting my help, now he’s hooked.
Remind me never to do any more favours for friends. Every time he gets a new assignment for his game design course, whether that be programming or software development, he turns to me. Seriously I get calls from him at the small hours of the morning which is when emaciated students hunch over their PCs like vampires. Why must they drag us functional nine-to-fivers into their darkened world? Never again will I let myself get sucked into the trap of students who take software development courses.
The problem, you see, is that I was too good at it. I was in a double bind. There’s no way I could have turned him down – he’d have called me a bad friend. But if I’d agreed to help him and then done a terrible job – explained things poorly, made mistakes, etc – then he’d have appreciated my effort but would never have come back for more support. That’s the trick, you see, to be just bad enough so that you never get asked again. There’s only one problem with it: I’m too sincere. There’s no way that I could deceive someone like that. Curse my strong morals and their no-good influence on my life.
-Mack