Shared recently by a friend of mine (on one of those social networking sites), a heartbreaking story, but not for the reasons you might expect.

A pretty, young woman is riding the train, reading a book. The entire car is empty, except for her and a quiet, elderly gentleman near the back. A young man enters, his bicycle in tow, and sits down directly opposite the young woman, leans over and says, “What’ch’ya readin’?”

She glares at him, voice piercing, “Look!”

Shock.

Another part of this series of posts, “Depression and the Software Developer.” This latest story I started on Monday, part 4 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.

[Note: You can read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]

No client or employer will ever admit to you that he doesn’t want to deal with reality. What he really wants is for you to just deliver what he needs, with zero effort on his part, in zero time, for zero dollars. If he gives you any more than that, it is only in grudging acceptance of the fact that you are not the omnipotent God. But a surprising number of project managers still act as though developers are superhuman, even if they accept that we are not divine. And a surprising number of developers are willing to accept that they are superhuman, even if they can’t deliver the actual goods.

And that was the case with this project. So I had no idea what made up the NOKWID feature that I was supposed to be developing (called NOKWID, because No One Knew What It Did), and Pointy-Hair 1 (the developer-turned-manager) and Pointy-Hair A (the manager-turned-developer) both seemed to be going out of their way to keep me in the dark.

If I were a voice talent, it would be like giving me a stack of ill-digested notes scribbled on sticky pads and saying, “Okay. Here’s the voice-over script. We need this by Thursday. When can you have it recorded?”

Needless to say, it stressed me out.

Here’s a story I’ve been keeping on the back burner for almost a year now. I haven’t published it until now, because it still hit too close to home. But this week, I’ve scheduled an interview with Sharon Cathcart, author of In the Eye of the Beholder, which I am currently reading, and a memoir Les Pensées Dangereuses. And parts of her story reminded me of certain elements of my story.

This is the story of the software-development project that plunged me into a deep depression (a continuation from part 3 of “Depression and the Software Developer”).

[Note: You can read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]

It was only a couple months long, but it was the straw that broke this developer’s back. It was the project that made me realize how much I enjoyed making a difference, as I did in my first job after college. It made me realize how important it was to make a difference, rather than just being a cog in a useless, corporate, perpetual-motion machine. Most development managers simply don’t know how to let their developers make a difference, possibly because they’ve never known themselves what it feels like. And to this day, the memory of this painful project keeps me from taking the software-development industry seriously.

The project itself wasn’t that bad. I joined it as a consulting developer, along with a couple other consulting developers. The client had been desperate for short-term help, and I took on the project as a favor for a friend, who was already hip-deep in it. They were also on a limited budget, and so I offered a reduced rate, again as a favor to my friend. That was Idiotic Decision #1.

The most important skill a writer can develop, in any field or genre of writing, is to empathize with his reader, because the reader will always judge your writing ultimately by what he feels. Mastery of this skill has resulted in some of the greatest feats of writing magic, especially among writers of sales copy, and neglect of it has resulted in some of the most notable snafus.

This week, for Wishcasting Wednesday, Jamie Ridler asks, “What do you wish to remember?”

Well, I wish to remember, as a writer, always to feel what my reader feels, which has historically been nigh impossible for me to achieve.

That’s what I did at my first job.