Some work tasks require vigilance and not much else.  The test that waits for weight to drop, or a bag to burst, or a filter to fail all require nothing but attention and the technical acumen of a banana slug.  Normally, these tests mandate I check something periodically but I was tasked with troubleshooting a computer daemon where if it failed and was left unattended for six minutes or more it’d crash a server.  So, I had a lot of watchful waiting in my future.

My solution was to set a recurring alarm on my phone for every 330 seconds and to glance at the computer I remoted into and then go back to other things.  I knew I was going to have to do this for at least six hours and chose to play a video game to pass the time as it was 2 AM with little else to do.  The work computers aren’t particularly powerful so I opted for “And Yet It Moves“, an indie platformer that cost me $10.00.  The game ran well enough and I soon got into the rhythm on being interrupted glancing over, scanning for red, and returning.  I thought I had struck gold when two hours and 30 minutes into the minimum six hour observation period I beat the game.  I kept forgetting that “Indie” was old English for “short”.

So, I needed something I could do on a low power machine that fine with interruption and that I could get from the Internet without work noticing.  Time to download Freecell.