Office themed anxiety, chat dungeon

Date: 9/14/2018

Doing some kind of game jam project at the office. My partner is a new hire, some person that I don’t know. He is asking me a bunch of questions in some chat client. At one point he calls me over in person to ask whether I expect to do “simple” or “complex” code. I have no idea what this means so I answer “simple,” and he looks vexed and comments out loud that he is going to need to recruit someone else who can code. Everyone in earshot is staring. When I get back to my desk, he informs me in chat that actually I am using the terminology wrong and that “complex” actually means adjusting variables and “simple” is writing code. At that moment a different window opens up on my desk. It is an AIM client but has something like a Winamp skin on it. The interface has two parts; it is set up in the style of a SNES era jrpg. The screen name list is like a top down dungeon environment in which the floor tiles are black separated my a grid of phosphorescent wintergreen lines. Names are represented by little avatars that you have to actually navigate through the environment and physically locate other users to initiate a conversation. The chat window itself is like a jrpg conversation window, but the font is very Winamp. It is all artifacted and blurred as though it were buggily running at a resolution much larger than its native one. It’s my old friend fuseji, who is surprised that I’m even running AIM (me too). I start to rearrange the conversation window, wanting to answer and catch up, and feeling some kinda way about this coworker problem that I’m dealing with, when I abruptly wake up.