Today is the strangest workday ever. Not since my days in free spending, foosball playing dot com land have I seen a workday with so much drama. Unfortunately for the reader, I have to be blurry and omit nearly anything that might be called juicy.

I watched a morning of cloak and dagger. And then I discussed the heuristic for counting lines of code.

You're not reading Dilbert, you're not watching Office Space; this stuff really happens in those tall building you pass on the expressway. In my cube. Under the flourescent lights. With the glare at my back shining on my monitor just like it does everyday. Then I'm in a fishbowl with everyone else and told that a consultant study wants all the lines of code counted. They're going to divide the gross number of lines by the number of programmers, factor in how many bugs have been reported over the previous 38 weeks, add a pre calculated code maintenance constant, and divide by Avogadro's number. The result means something. They have a very smart algorithm.

We're counting whitespace too.

Addendum: If you're not familiar with what I mean by counting lines of code, that is adding up the lines of source code in the application. Quantifying the efficiency of programming work by counting lines of code is akin to quantifying the quality of a book by counting the pages. Make sense?