Days in the Life of Mo

If you’ve ever written a shell script at 2 AM, tired, half-caffeinated, and convinced you’re a genius, only to realize the next morning that your code is about as structured as a toddler’s finger painting… welcome. You’re in the right place.

Because that’s exactly what my morning routine feels like.

Every day, I wake up determined to be productive, and somehow end up debugging my life before breakfast.

#!/bin/bash

Let’s start from the top.

Every script begins with a shebang, that confident little line that says “This script knows what it’s doing.”

That’s me, every morning at 5:00 AM. Alarm blaring. I whisper to myself, “Today, we rise early. Today, we conquer the day.”

Fast forward to 6:12 AM. The only thing I’ve conquered is the snooze button, multiple times. My script hasn’t even executed.

Step 1: Initialization (a.k.a. The Wake-Up Sequence)

My brain boots slower than an old Ubuntu VM running on a Pentium II.

There’s always an if statement:

if [ "$coffee" == "ready" ]; then
  start_day;
else
  panic;
fi

Some mornings, I forget to initialize $coffee altogether, and that’s when things really break. I start talking to Arizona, my pot plant, like she’s my scrum master.

“Arizona, what are today’s deliverables?”

She doesn’t answer. (She’s green, but not that kind of green.)

Step 2: The Race Condition

Between brushing my teeth, finding my glasses, and trying to convince my laptop to boot faster than my body, chaos. Pure chaos.

My morning routine has race conditions everywhere.

I’ll start making toast, then suddenly remember I was supposed to be making tea. The kettle’s boiling, the bread’s burning, and I’m standing there holding my phone, wondering why my reflection looks like a stack trace.

If my routine were a script, it would be one long, unoptimized loop:

while true; do
  try_to_get_ready;
  forget_something;
  go_back;
done

Step 3: Missing Semicolons of Life

Every programmer knows the pain of a missing semicolon. It’s the invisible mistake that brings your whole world crashing down.

For me, it’s socks. Always socks.

One’s in the laundry, one’s under the bed, and I’m there, barefoot philosopher, asking the universe why life can’t just echo "done" for once.

Step 4: Error Handling? Never Heard of Her.

In programming, we use try...catch to handle unexpected events gracefully.

In life? I use “try…cry.”

Forgot my access card? Try… cry.
Stepped on paintbrush on the way out? Try… say words that would make my ancestors gasp.

Honestly, my error-handling block could use a serious refactor.

Step 5: Output Logs

By 9 AM, my log file is a disaster:

[06:00] Alarm triggered  
[06:03] Alarm ignored  
[06:15] Attempted to wake up  
[06:45] System overheating (too many thoughts)  
[07:10] Coffee spilled  
[07:15] Existential dread detected  
[07:25] Out the door (finally)

Step 6: Cleanup (Optional, Apparently)

Every script worth running ends with a cleanup routine… clearing temporary files, resetting variables, restoring order.

Me? I leave my bed looking like an abandoned merge conflict.

In Conclusion: Automate, But Make It Human

I’ve come to accept that my mornings don’t need to be perfect. They just need to run, preferably without fatal errors.

So now, instead of trying to rewrite the entire thing, I’ve learned to add little improvements… a new alias here, a cron job there.

Because honestly, maybe that’s what life is: one big messy shell script, and we’re all just trying to get it to run a little smoother every day.

And if all else fails? sudo reboot.

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