MEOW
Nita looked down from her keyboard to see her BFF Mutex staring up at her from a position near her feet. Mutex was the Pomodoro made physical, it seemed she always knew when Nita needed a break from her work as a platform engineer for Infinity Co, a division of Zero Industries.
"What's the matter girl?", she asked as she bent to gently stroke Mutex along her furry forehead. The particular sound emitted by her best furry friend had indicated distress of a sort, but for a cat that could mean anything from "the water in my dish is slightly warmer than I prefer" to "the entirety of the laundry room is on fire, and I had nothing to do with it".
Years of late night pages from monitoring systems configured by those without a pager had taught her that the first step in solving a production problem was to assess its severity. Years of late night pages from her BFF had taught her that the first step in solving a kitty complication is to just get up and follow her friend to where she was needed.
"What do you mean you're out of food? I was just at the pet store...", she trailed off as she thought about how there was still a bit of snow on the ground the last time she had been the Value-Pet and how the tulips were now fully in bloom in front of her two story walk-up. "Ok, ok. I'll make a trip. First let me see what else we need. I might as well do a full round of errands if I'm going out".
She grabbed her phone and opened up the new app she had been working on. It was just a simple page that allowed her to add a list of needed items, and the store that they came from. She could add stuff to it whenever she noticed she was out, and it would produce individualized grocery lists by store with an optimized route between them. "It even colour codes the list by effort as it gets larger", she murmured to her cat as she gave her a brushy-brush before leaving. "That way I'm less likely to leave things to the last minute".
That was the hope at least, the inertia of inaction was always difficult to overcome.
Nita spent a few minutes checking around the house for anything she may have forgotten to add to her list throughout the week, another habit learned from trying to develop a platorm through a sea of context destroying deskside interruptions. "It never hurts to double check in case you missed something while distracted", she said to mainly herself as she finished tying her shoes, her friend Mutex had wandered back to wherever cats go when they have achieved their goal and lost interest in further interaction.
Phone in hand, she grabbed her keys and purse and headed out.