All Quiet on the Code Front

From a young age, I always liked rainy days. Like many introverts, I enjoyed the excitement thunderstorms brought and the sight of dark, overcast skies. It was peaceful, hearing the white noise of a million drops hitting the earth. Yet, was that not chaos?

As a kid, I never suspected I'd become a software engineer. My path to tech has been anything but traditional. I realized early on that the conventional schooling system wasn't for me. After all, I was a regular C student who found that most of what I was learning could be discovered online anyway. In college, I couldn't major in any engineering or computer fields because I lacked the necessary math background. I needed to complete several semesters and finish calculus before I could even start the core classes. I thought it was a shame.

I really wanted to break into tech. It offered interesting problems, intelligent people, and good money. Now, here I am, having completed coding classes, hackathons, team projects, and worked in a couple roles in software engineering. It's been a wild ride—chaotic, stressful, weird, but mostly fun. During that time, I stagnated a bit. I noticed myself gaining weight and not hanging out as much. As I intensely studied and worked late into the nights, trying to go above and beyond, there would soon be an event that would shake me to my core. An event that would remind me that life was happening outside of the computer screen.

It wasn't an abrupt wake-up call that said, "Shafee, don’t you see all this life happening outside of the computer?" No, it was more subtle and haunting.

In early 2024, I set out to visit Indonesia for vacation. From New York, I would fly to Dubai, and from Dubai, I was to go to Indonesia. Yet, on the very day I arrived for my connecting flight in Dubai, all flights were either delayed or canceled. Emirates, my airline, explained online that because of unexpected floods that hit Dubai, there was little to no turnover of employees coming in that day, and planes couldn't travel in that weather.

Sleepless for over 14 hours from my flight from New York to Dubai, I stood dumbfounded in a crowd of thousands of angry customers at my airline’s Connections Desk. I asked a kind elderly woman traveling to Thailand from England, "What's going on? Why are there only two Emirates agents and so many people here? Why aren't there any flight details on the screen?" I was told to just wait in line like everyone else. And wait I did.

For ten hours, I stood on my feet, sleepless, hungry, and thirsty. Frustrated. Around me were people of all ages—some with children, some elderly, some young. All of us had our flights disrupted by this unanticipated event in Dubai. As we waited, people grew increasingly angry; some even started fights with the airport sweepers. All around me in line was the exhaustion of people, their warm vacant breaths wafting through the air, making me dizzy and on the verge of tears. Five hours into waiting in line, there was very little progress, and behind me was another cluster of hundreds of customers who, like me, had their smiles turn to dismay as the reality of the situation set in: waiting in line for God knows how many hours. I wanted to quit and lie down on the floor outside the line, as many already had. I prayed for a miracle, I wanted everyone here to be delivered, for a miraculous sea to be parted and for more airline agents to come out of thin air right here in front of us so that we could finally get out. But all we could do was patiently wait. In front of me was the old woman traveling to Thailand; her legs were trembling, and I could tell she couldn't take it anymore.

Eventually, I reached the front of the line some nine and a half hours later. I received a replacement ticket from the airline agent for my next flight. I squeezed out of the line and sat down next to an artificial waterfall by the elevator. I looked over to where I had just come from—the ocean of people waiting in line, who would probably be there for as long as I was, or more. But a wave of relief washed over me like I had never felt before. I had never felt joy like that in my life—finally getting service after waiting that long—it was inexplicable. I was out of that hell, and I could be on my way. I received a free hotel ticket to wait for my next flight.

As I sat there, drinking complimentary pear juice from the airport staff, I reflected on the experience. I closed my eyes and rewound the last eleven hours. I was proud of myself for having persevered through it. But I realized something very important: what I witnessed was a real problem, something that tech couldn't fix. And there are a lot of things tech can't fix (yet, anyway), whether it's making airline agents come to work in flooded weather or making time go faster. Yes, I loved being a software engineer. I loved the intellectual stimulation, I loved solving interesting problems, creating meaningful things. But in that airport, I watched mothers hold back their tears as their children cried waiting for hours on end, I watched the elderly quit two hours in because their hips had called it. I saw how fragile and useless tech can be.

There in that airport, I was reminded of the fundamental things that connect us all: simple basic needs, our emotions, our resilience in the face of adversity, our limitations. Technology can only serve us so much, but at the end of the day, it's about the people it serves. It's been and always has been about people.

As I later took a taxi to the hotel, it drizzled and the tiny drops pattered over the car window. I thought back to how much I loved rainy days. Maybe not when it causes floods, but when there was a nice balanced downpour. Just as the rain can be both soothing, it can also be destructive. There’s going to be times in our lives when things are going swimmingly, but there's always going to be unexpected challenges, and you'd better weather the storm. Relish those moments of drizzle and calm, but don't wait for a hurricane to hit to remember the shared humanity that binds us all.