I dunno. I just… I can’t stop thinking about it. Like it happened a few weeks ago, but it’s still playing in my head. You know how sometimes you get a song stuck in there? This is like that, but worse. Because it’s not a song, it’s… me. Failing. In front of everyone. We were doing this big presentation, right? To the new VP, all the stakeholders, the whole shebang. Me, Liam, Sarah. We’d been working on this architecture for months, pulling all-nighters, fuelled by bad coffee and even worse pizza. And it was good, really good. I mean, I *thought* it was good. My design, my baby, practically. And I’m up there, doing my bit, talking about the microservices, the API gateways, all the jargon, and everyone’s nodding, seems impressed. I even made a joke that landed, which, for me, is like a miracle. And then Liam, he throws a curveball, asks me about a specific snippet of code, like, “Hey Mark, can you just quickly show them that little bit where we handle the async call, the retry logic?” And I was like, “Yeah, no worries.” So I pull up the screen, and I’m about to type it out, right? And my fingers are just… frozen. Blank. Absolutely BLANK. I knew it. I’d written it a hundred times, probably in my sleep, that little bit of Python. `try: except:` or whatever it was, the structure. It was so basic. SO basic. Like telling someone to spell their name and forgetting the letters. And I just stood there, my mouth a little open, probably looking like a fish. The silence was… heavy. You could hear the hum of the projector. Liam gave me this look, like, *you alright, mate?* and I could feel my face getting hot, the kind of hot that starts in your ears and spreads. And then Sarah, bless her heart, she just jumped in, typed it out for me, quick as anything, like it was nothing. And I mumbled something about a brain fart, a senior moment. But it wasn’t. It was just… gone. It’s just… I’m forty-seven, almost forty-eight. Been doing this for twenty years, more. Software architecture, high-level stuff. I’m supposed to be the guy who knows. The guy who has all the answers. My kids, they think I’m some kind of wizard with computers. My wife, she just laughs when I explain what I do, but she’s proud, I know she is. And out here, in this little town, everyone knows I work for ‘the big tech company’ and I make ‘good money.’ They don’t know what I *do* exactly, but they know it’s important. Or they *think* it’s important. And then I can’t even remember a simple line of code. It’s like, what’s the point? All those years, all those late nights, missing school plays, missing anniversaries sometimes, for *this*? For my brain to just go poof. And now I keep thinking, what if it happens again? What if it’s not just a one-off? What if this is the start of… something? I spend so much time just staring at screens, building these elaborate digital castles that nobody outside of this little world even understands. And then for a second, I forget the bricks. The basic, fundamental bricks. It makes you wonder what you’re even doing, you know? Just… sitting here, 2 AM, looking at my phone, still feeling that flush in my face. Still hearing the projector hum. Maybe I should just open a bait shop. Or finally fix that leaky tap in the bathroom. At least I know how to do that. Probably.