Tomorrow we ship out! First patrol in the wild, and it's gonna be a good one. Watch out, wrongdoers, because we're coming for ya!
I'm PFC Manuela Ruiz-Borrego, and I'm here to take the fight to the other guys!
I joined the development army to help fight the cause, protect my industry and my family, and now I'm finally getting my chance. I've been waiting for this my whole life, and now I can once and for all prove that I belong here, that I belong somewhere.
Oh, right. About that. See, I haven't had a whole lot of close friends growing up. My family, they've always been with me, through everything we've had to endure. The semicolon drought of '05, the great exception plague of '08, even the infestation of our family server farm by Heisenbugs. Little devils, those, they were pretty difficult to squish, kept changing every time we tried to pin 'em down. Through all of it, my family has been by my side, and I am grateful to them for it.
Friends, though, friends were... difficult. I'm not a very social person, so it was hard for me to keep long-term friends. The few that I did have were (and still are) great, but I've never really felt like I truly belonged with them, in their groups and with our peers. I guess I always felt like an outsider? Maybe that's too strong of a word.
Anyway, here I am, the night before we ship out, and I can't wait.
Basic training was a snap. My trainer gave me all the pointers I need. All you really have to do is remember to keep the caps lock on and ignore anything the enemy yells at you. Oh, and watch out for incoming pedantry strikes, because that's the best time to counterattack. All's fair in love and online arguments.
Now that I've completed basic training, I get to follow in my mother's footsteps, joining the great programming army and becoming a net soldier. This is going to be the best years of my life.
I'm really looking forward to shipping out to the forums and discussion boards tomorrow, as you can probably tell from my outburst earlier. Although... I'm still a little unsure as to exactly what we're going to do. My sergeant said that we'll be looking for the "heathens that use underscores" but I don't know why underscores matter to us. Our orders are to shout at them on sight, so warmups tomorrow will include practicing how loud we can be and how quickly we can type (the sergeants don't care about spelling and grammar errors). But what happens if they don't listen?
It doesn't matter. The sergeants say that's what we need to do, so that's what we're gonna do. When you're in the army, you learn to take orders no matter who gives them, and I'm going to follow mine.
I'll make you proud, Mom! You just wait! Those slackers won't know what hit them. We'll wipe the underscore users off this planet!
OK, that was definitely too strong. We'll just make them see the error of their ways. Repeatedly. Oh my God this is going to be so much fun!
