4 movies I pretend my job is like

By night you may know me as the debonair playboy who keeps the gears of this website lubricated. However, by day I assume the guise of a mild-mannered web developer, whose co-workers have no idea I was once voted "least honky" by a pimp focus group.

I'm not saying my job is tedious, but there are only so many lines of code you can rattle out before the idea of taking a calculator home to meet Mother suddenly makes sense. So in order to stay focused I've invented a fun mind game everybody can enjoy: simply pretend the daily rigours are part of a fantastic Hollywood setup! That's why my job is a bit like...

Inception

Much to the annoyance of my peers - and the cinema in which I was openly making braying sounds - Inception didn't exactly blow me away. And here's the fascinating reason why. Anyone who has toyed with stylesheets (the part of a website that makes things blue or red or bold) will be familiar with "divs". No, not the 'durr durr' kind - the sort used to contain bits of styled text.

Inside divs you can place more divs. And then more divs. And then some more - divs within divs for as far as the browser can render. But here's the exciting part: divs inherit properties from their containers, so if one div fucks up, or a style is mis-coded, it can affect everything contained within. See where this is headed? (*BRAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHM*)

In a way, us web developers already have the foundation for that whole "go deeper" gimmick ingrained into our brains, leaving us free to figure out the film's bigger mysteries - like, why does DiCaprio always look like he's wearing his Dad's clothes? In a better way, the boredom of creating a fully W3C-compliant website can be alleviated by pretending you're the architect for a sweet Call Of Duty-esque snow level.


The Matrix

Barely a day goes by when a visitor to my desk doesn't look at the open text editor on screen and make one - or sometimes all - of the following deeply hilarious statements: "You must live in The Matrix!", "I bet you see everything as zeros and ones!", "Do I look all green and black to you?" I'll tell you what you look like in a minute.

But instead of flying into a rage and setting fire to them, I've learnt to flip the situation like burgers made from a cow who knew nothing but deception (mmm, lieburgers). These people really do have no idea what those thousands of lines of gibberish mean, so I might as well use the opportunity to, shall we say, exaggerate my Code Fu.

"Yeah this is going to be used to transmit nuclear launch codes for WW3..."

"You know Google? Well, this is like that except it translates those dolphin clicking sounds..."

"We've been asked to supercompute the optimal texture for suede..."

Okay, it's not exactly Neo levels of Universe-manipulating superpowers, but it's the closest thing I've got, alright? Apart from the trenchcoat, shades and desire to kill everyone that is.


The Prestige

I forget his name, but years ago a magician turned his back on the Magic Circle, after deciding the twin skills of distraction and misdirection were perfectly suited to this new-fangled (at the time) digital canvas. Also I hear he crushed a sleeveful of doves with his bare hands, and it didn't go down too well at a childrens' birthday party.

It took many years of practise, but once I'd become skilled enough at building websites to realise what he meant, it was a revelation. Web developers are magicians... just not in the traditional 'rabbit out of a hat' vein. More like in a Jonathan Creek, figurey-outey kind of way. Creepy weirdos, in other words.

Everything we do is to create a seamless experience - functions and systems are our pulleys and mirrors, browsers are our stage. It sounds really wanky but if you're using a website and clicking about without thinking, then the webgician has successfully created the illusion of interactivity from a bunch of flat graphics and links. We're all totally ripped like Hugh Jackman too. Go on, feel my muscles. Feel them.


The Horse Whisperer

A big part of the web developer's duties are ensuring web pages get picked up by search engines (i.e. Google and, er, the others). This is done using header tags, unordered lists, 301 redirects, and other optimisation methods I'm sure you're all familiar with and are suitably impressed by.

But despite all these l33t skills, a keyword can sometimes be a right bastard to crack, which is when you have to go organic and become one with the Internet, cowboy style. The whispering is optional, but the principle remains the same: gradually nurture something into health until it can stand on it's own two (four) feet (hooves). Well, it makes sense to me, and provides a nice excuse for the slow drawl I call a voice. And I like the hat.

Confession time: I've never actually seen The Horse Whisperer, but IMDB says it has Scarlett Johansson in so that's an instant 10/10 - unless it's a pre-nose job ScarJo, in which case... (*shudder*). I have, however, seen looooads of The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, which seems to be more or less the same thing. Just pretend the horses are further away.