Incoming – Sandra 50

[For a quick guide go here: Quick guide.

For back story go here: Story so far at 30 Nov 2020 and more recent Sandra episodes especially this one.]

[Other back story through in-links.]

Tamsin Bailey was an amazing programmer. She’d worked hard to get to the level she was at. At school she found herself adept at maths, science and physics – and a few other things besides – but her teachers were rather cool on her, not giving her any particular push here or there to guide her, leaving Tamsin to work it out for herself. Which she did.

At home she was quite happy. Her parents had jobs which had no influence on her life choices and there was no preferential treatment given to her due to any siblings she may or may not have had. To be honest they were an irrelevance to her career trajectory, because, at the end of the day, everything she had achieved, she had achieved.

At sixth form college she experienced a slight lapse in concentration on her course work, wondering for a few months - as everyone does - what exactly life had in store for her and what she wanted to get out of it. She dabbled in this and that, but ultimately found herself still achieving and feeling good about the things she could do with a computer. She did it because it made her happy and whatever anyone else said or commented on was really nothing to do with anything because she just essentially did what she enjoyed.

Tamsin’s interests now covered chess, bingo, backgammon, classical music (mainly Mahler) ABBA, The Queens of the New Stone Age, The XX, Sigrid, Lorde, Harry Styles, the recordings of John Cale, English and lemon tea. She tried to get into Frank Zappa but felt it would take up too much of her time to do him justice.

Meanwhile she created and launched her own app, a simple affair that offered an aide memoire for research scientists who wanted to keep their top line results in one place. She created this alone, launched it herself and put it in front of a few people. They were very happy with it and said she should sell it on to someone or do a more significant launch but she just said nah. She’d really done it for herself and learned things by it.

Then she coded an app based game involving three gnomes, a frog, seven unicorns and a duck called Bill. The game went viral. Tamsin knew she was in demand and knew she could make money out of this. Maybe lots of money.

However it wasn't really something she wanted to do at that point. About five people told her she was throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime, but Tamsin pointed out it was her lifetime and not really any of anyone else’s business what happened in it or to it. She did what she wanted to do and therefore nothing was wasted. Not effort nor chance nor opportunity.

Leaving college she did go on to higher education, choosing instead to work for a large corporate company, looking after their tech requirements. She was very good at this job and was constantly being told so by her department boss. Her boss had a tendency to muck up their technology and then need Tamsin to come and fix everything. She was very adept at this and enjoyed putting things right which she always did without drawing attention to how the other person had caused this problem in the first place. It was just one of those things. And it was just what she wanted to do.

And so having had an enjoyable career so far, together with some enjoyable other events occurring alongside the work thing which were really of no concern to the employers at Together... Apart, Tamsin heard from a friend of a friend that an app based business were looking for new people to come and do their thing for them. It appeared the app was trying to do something different, and there was wriggle room for her to explore her own idea. This was somewhere where her contribution would be appreciated from day one.

“I’m not sure...” said Adrian over the Zoom channel, reading through her CV, following a video interview.

“I am,” said Sandra, “and you’re fired.”

Sandra ended the call. Adrian looked at the screen for a moment. Then he took off the ‘This is what a feminist looks like' T-Shirt which he had hoped would gain him a couple of credits with Sandra and, sat in his vest, dialled the first person he could think of who was waiting for him to dig them out of a bug-ridden mess. For more money.

Sandra closed down the Zoom programme and phoned Tamsin to welcome her abroad Together... Apart. She loved days like these.