Why the "Herder of Wildebeeste"?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

In one of my previous jobs as a programmer, I ended up having a fairly large upstairs office all to myself. I had been sharing it with another engineer, but he had moved onto a different project and had been given a small office all to himself downstairs. Anyway, being the messy sort of person that I am, I spread out around the room in a perfectly logical manner. My own original desk was full of computers, phones, coffee mugs and the like, plus the books and files that I needed immediately at hand while I typed. Next to me, Richard's former desk was covered in paper and books that I didn't immediately need at hand or which could be of some use while I was scribbling bits of design (which I like to do away from the keyboard - there's less temptation to actually start programming).

In the opposite corner was the test kit. Now, debugging networking software and hardware can take quite a lot of test kit, and even the small rig that I had in my room (as opposed to the major network we sometimes set up in the seminar room) consisted of several computers, network disc sharers, routers, bridges and so on. I tended to be only working on small bits of it at once, but I still needed the lot to actually provoke the bugs that were being reported to me.

Now the standard routine for testing networks is to go and provoke your problem, take notes of all the normally inaccessible diagnostics that you've got hold of (Logic Analysers make the best program tracing tools I know!), mutter gnomicly, go back over to your development kit and make a few random changes in the hope that the problem will go away. Usually, I confess, I did have some idea of what was going on, so my fixes weren't just random, it just sounds better that way. Regardless, once the compiler has churned its way through and pointed out your latest batch of spelling mistakes, you end up with a floppy disc of new drivers to be soft-loaded or a freshly cooked EPROM to insert, and the whole cycle starts again.

I am incorrigibly lazy. I don't like moving around more than I have to at work, it just wastes time and energy that could be better spent on writing more code, but will more likely be spent on drinking coffee. It used to somewhat irk me that the test kit was on the opposite side of the room. It was, however, undeniably the best place for all that kit.

I also had a wheelie chair. Most of you, I suspect, are way ahead of me here. Yes, rather than walk several yards across the room, I'd just drift across on the chair. What with one thing and another, this wasn't a quiet enterprise - I'm not light, the chair wasn't brand new, and the carpet wasn't smooth. On a bad day, the rumbling was quite noticable.

So it was that one day, in the middle of a set of rapid updates to the test gear, the phone rang. I punted myself back over to my desk and picked it up, to discover the caller was Steve, the guy who had the office immediately below mine. In rather pained tones, he asked if I would kindly stop herding wildebeeste up there, since he was finding them hoofing it back and forth rather distracting. It seemed that the floor was very good at amplifying sound, and what was a gentle rumbling to me was positively thunderous down there.

This caused problems for other people as well. The person in the next-door office to me had a rather staccato rapid-fire typing style, and preferred a very positive action IBM keyboard. In the office below him, this sounded like irregular machinegun fire. Even the machine room, usually a site of whining fans and the gentle burbling of happy modems, occasionally leaked noise into the office below it; usually the sound of someone knocking one of the many keyboards off its precarious perch as they tried to work out exactly which monitor they should be watching at any given moment.

Anyway, that's how I came to be accused of herding wildebeeste. Steve being Steve, the name not only stuck but was rapidly disseminated around the company. Personally I think he was just trying to distract attention from the general Steveness of his office (where a table was considered clear if it had less than six inches of rubbish on it). Of course, that's not the only wildebeeste story, but the others will have to wait for another time....