Looking on the bright side

My previous post was somewhat downbeat, probably because I only managed to get around an hours sleep last night due to a ridiculously trapped nerve in my neck that has been tormenting me for months. With that in mind I thought that perhaps I should write about the lighter side of my life.

OCD can really drag you down and of course the often resulting depression is difficult to get out of. Frankly last week I was in a very poor state mentally and before I decided to start writing a blog again this week, I had spent most of the past month (or maybe more) in bed in agony with my neck. As I mentioned before, a life unlived is a terrible thing so even though I sit at my desk with what appears to be the equivalent of red hot needles ground down to sharp shards of sand (but still just as pointy) surging through my neck and shoulder; I am determined to show that while my OCD may have destroyed parts of my life, it may just have changed others in a slightly more positive way.

Again, I can’t speak for everyone with OCD, I merely offer my own experience of the disorder but I find that, without OCD I may not have made certain decisions in my life particularly regarding my career...

Before my ten year career as a software tester, I desperately wanted to be a writer. With my whole heart. I admit that I may have a tenuous grasp of grammar (you may have noticed this) and I’m definitely not as eloquent or articulate as someone like Stephen Fry or as skilled in the art of writing as Douglas Adams but I had two things that had never failed me before – obsessive behaviour allowing me to write for long periods of time without rest (and unfortunately for you dear reader a tendency to ramble on) but also enthusiasm to get my thoughts down. I have a palpable urge to write, I always have, even as a child. While my scribblings in my youth may have been childish and naive (and probably still are!) I wanted nothing but to write as many books as my imagination could spew out and the ideas were, and still are plentiful. Even as I write this I have three novels in progress that I have been crafting for some time, several other ideas, some short story ideas, a poem or two and a fantastic (or so I think) idea for a Doctor Who monster! 

Unfortunately, bills have to be paid and unless I managed to craft my ‘magnificent octopus’ (as described by Baldrick in Blackadder) and make money then I had to have a career that I could rely on and one that I enjoyed. I never gave up writing, as you can see, but I had to create a career for myself in the meantime. I’ve never been in writing for the money or fame, merely to entertain people and hopefully raise a smile or two, but you do need some money to live so I had to be realistic.

After a few years into a computing degree I realised that frankly, when it came to software development I was hopeless. I could write software and knock things together but I wasn’t very efficient and the first time I actually wrote some code that didn’t just display ‘Hello World’ I was crushingly disappointed. Having spent a great deal of time pulling together a substantial amount of COBOL code for a piece of coursework I spent most of the night wrestling with compiler errors galore the night before it was due to be handed in (yes, not an ideal scenario I grant you) and almost sobbing at 9am the next day. A friend of mine came into the computer lab where I was just about tearing out my hair and he said chirpily “You’ve missed a full stop...there” and he added it promptly, selecting compile. I can’t remember exactly what the compiler said. Whether it said ‘No errors found’ or ‘Code Compiled successfully’ or ‘This works but you suck!’ (unlikely, although I did suck) I wanted to simultaneously kiss everyone and punch my fist through a wall – it was difficult to really grasp what emotion I was looking for. The wonderful news was that my pretend ATM program worked! But it was terrible. So much work had gone into this software for it to do so little and at that point, whether I was tired or whether I just realised that software development wasn’t for me, I was soul wrenchingly disappointed.

I discovered my love for software testing quite by accident and I strongly believe that without my OCD I wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as I was at software testing. I’m not saying that I was amazing; I was pretty good but not astounding. I’m also not saying that you have to have OCD to be a good software tester but it did help a great deal. 

With the way my brain works I found that my attention to detail was exceptional and when going into testing a piece of software (mainly mobile phone games and then later web and other interesting pieces) I could see the layout of the software laid out in my head for easy access. My visual brain allowed me to navigate around areas of the game in my head and work out intriguing and intricate ways to really wreck the heck out of them. And I did. I could take games that had been certified and just needed a quick check and reduce them to rubble just because I thought about things in a slightly different way to the original tester. One of the developers I worked with used to call me the ‘evil tester’ as I once spent several hours into the night working with him and the producer on a bug that only I seemed to be able to recreate. 

I would work tirelessly, I spent many hours late in the office helping to seek out bugs while learning to juggle oranges or playing chess badly (in my case) with my boss while waiting for builds. I was determined that once I started a job, it would get finished no matter what time it was. I was completely bloody minded when it came to getting things done and managed to keep going even through long shifts. I was sent to America to test a game and I would spend all night testing, get a few hours sleep then back to it in the morning. I absolutely loved my job.

As part of my daily obsessions and compulsions, they rely on a good eye for detail and due to the fact that my brain conjures up the consequences of everything I say or do before I say or do it, as you can imagine this pretty much a perfect fit for software testing. I have a healthy dose of curiosity too so when something wasn’t working, I would endeavour to find out why then try to give the developers as much information as possible. I really hope that I made their job a little easier, even as I was making it harder.

My point is that, without the way that my brain works, I probably wouldn’t have become a software tester. I may not have stared at that flashing cursor on my COBOL program feeling that I had done so much work and that it looked so small in comparison. I didn’t get the satisfaction making something work, I got it from taking software whole and breaking it down into component parts to see if I could break it. Without my job I also may never have met my husband whom I adore and who has really been my rock. 

Nowadays I can only work from home until I build up the strength of mind to be able to work in an office again and there are very few software testing roles out there working from home. So, a few years ago, lonely in my flat and desperate to be part of the workforce again, I turned to the one thing that I had loved all my life – writing.

I wrote blogs, I wrote reviews, I wrote product descriptions. I wrote anything that would get people to see what I was capable of and give me a job and slowly the opportunities flowed in. At one point I was doing so much work as I just couldn’t say no and I had to reduce my workload but I got the chance to write about so many interesting things and there are new challenges every day to look forward to.

Again, because of my OCD and the curiosity and ideas that would pop into my brain, I’ve been able to create so much and enjoy doing something that I have always wanted to do. Perhaps if my mind didn’t work the way it did, who knows what I would have ended up doing career wise?

Oh, and the odd and exciting dreams I have! Well, that’s another post all of its own!