I need to know Pascal? Sure, no problem

It started when I ran into someone I knew who was heading the department. He said they had a job opening in a month, but I'd need to know Pascal. Being ambitious, I said sure, no problem. And I made it, in that month I learned everything that was in the book.

Imagine my horror when on the first day my boss showed me a sample selection script: this is here, that is there, now write something similar. I sat down at the computer and it didn't resemble anything I had learned. In the book everything came in order, chapter by chapter, and here there was table after table to initialise quotas, and then algorithms that were supposed to tie it all together.

The first few weeks were spent reading that script line by line and guessing what the author had in mind. But I survived, I managed, and today I'm already tinkering in Delphi.

I still say “sure, no problem”, just a bit more carefully :-)