The video conference


The developer walked hurriedly towards the conference room, his coffee hand outstretched half way away from his nicely ironed shirt and blue patterned tie, held down by his ID card hanging on his neck. He was late for the morning daily scrum meeting, he thought again as he approached the conference room. He opened the door ever so quietly, stepping into the navy blue square patterned carpet of the conference room. Still twenty or so eyes at the back of the room turned towards him. They seemed to be waiting for a distraction to show up.

In front of the crowd of twenty odd people in the room, a person's face projected on the wall spoke in a monotonous voice. He read out the modules' names and their daily status on the work remaining.  Behind him were a bunch of impatient faces, impatient to leave for the day. They constantly shook their heads, as their team lead gave commitments on their behalf on meeting the deadline for code freeze the coming Friday, stealing looks at their watches once in a while. Except for two bachelors who did not mind staying late, rest were desperate to get out and start their two hour commutes to reach back their homes.

Andy looked at the small picture at the bottom right of the projection on the wall. It showed all the people standing in the room looking at the wall. The video projection on the wall lit their faces in strange ways. He looked for his face in the crowd projected on the wall, but could not find it.

He thought on the reason why he was the last person to enter the room, now lost in the crowd. Traffic had been good today for Andy, so could not remember why he was late. However there were other things that he needed to think about in the dark room. There was code to be fixed. Specially, he needed to get one of the exception tests to run. He looked at his watch and let out a big sigh as he contemplated refactoring his code to make it work. It was the third day this week and the test was not passing. It was going to be a long day, he thought, taking a deep sip from his coffee as he envied the people who were ready to the leave the office at the end of their workday half way around the world.

His team mates in the room seemed to be preoccupied with troubles of their own, as they all looked intently at the projection in front of them. What was bothering them he thought for a fraction of a second. He gave up quickly, he had enough problems to solve of his own.

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