clancy@stackoverflow

I had written him a email which I had for want of detail
Sent to where I’d met him down co-working years ago;
He was coding when I knew him, so I sent the email to him
Just as spam, addressed as follows to clancy@stackoverflow.
And the answer came directed in language unexpected.
(And I think the same was written by a bot gone too far.)
A MIME server wrote it and verbatim I will quote it :
‘Clancy’s gone web3 coding. This email ain’t where he are’

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-coding ‘down the crypto’ where the cowboy coders go;
As the market slowly crashes, Clancy types smiling at the slashes,
For the coder’s life has pleasures that the HODLers never know.

His socials have friends to meet him and their trolling greets him
In the murmur of the feeds and memes, both new and old,
And he sees the vision splendid of a backlog e’er extended,
At night the wonderous glory of coding fingers growing cold.

I am sitting in my open office where a coffee cart low whistle
struggles feebly over all the open necked shirts and chino pants,
pingpong games rebounded between the standing desks surrounded
by a whiteboard, spreading strategy nobody ever understands.

In place of a dark mode screen, I see the sticky notes’ sheen,
full of plain words, yet still a muddle to any huddle spectator,
I see ideas slowly dying and hustling staff inside-crying,
in the workshops with the muffins and the agile facilitator.

All the hurrying people daunt me, and their masked faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in the busy queue to eat,
With their eager eyes and greedy and stunted plans so weedy,
For bizfolk have no time to code, they have only time to meet.

And I sometimes briefly fancy I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at coding, where the riches come and go,
While he faced the matrixed gloom of the Teams and the Zoom
but no doubt he’d scam the office, clancy@stackoverflow

With humblest apologies to AB ‘Banjo’ Patterson