I'm trying to figure something out, I'm trying to figure out how to tell my wife that 40 minutes is not enough computer time... that to program, you have to be left for like 3 hour stretches, and only contacted if there's going to be some coffee arriving with it.
And that the silence after they call your name is not "ignoring" its holding 7 +/- 2 items in short term memory and so scrabbling around for a pen before replacing some value with "let the dog out" or "empty the dishwasher".
Now, I love my wife, she's doing some great job trying to understand that my sitting at a desk for 9+ hours a day typing code does actually pay the mortgage, and therefore I'm not just full of shit when I say I do something for a living that means "playing on the computer"... But she's not getting the time scales involved.
Her job is nursing related, caring related, so she does a task for a person in 10-15 minutes and moves on. Her mother before her was a nurse, does 10-15 minutes on a task and moves on, her Father is a builder, he hammers in a bunch of nails, lays a load of bricks, plains a bunch of wood and moves onto a new task, he's quick, he'll not spend more than an hour on one task...
I however... I might have to spend 4 hours on one class, or designing something, or documenting something (yes I'm a programmer - not a coder - because I document my stuff folks - hehe). All this takes a LOT of time... and I'm trying, slowly, to introduce her to the concept.
My current strategies however are to shout "Yeah, a minute"... "I'm on my way, I'm doing a compile" (compiled - she's witnessed can take from 15minutes up to an hour, so she has seen LARGE projects being built - I am not going to tell her that "normal" projects build in about 10 seconds... Not until she's worked out that 99.98% of the time is cerebral and her yelling form three rooms and one floor away, is annoying the shit out of my concentration.
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