Last Friday, I got a chance to meet with the new customer.  I got up early, dusted off my hard hat and put on my best business casual clothes and took a 4-hour road trip to "Dinoland" (Texas' Permian Basin, land of dinosaur fossils and black gold).  We had our kickoff meeting at the local BBQ place, and then drove over to the gas processing plant, where I was able to sink my nicest shoes into 2 inches of mud.  I should have worn jeans and work boots like I had originally planned.  Anyway, we had a rather long engineering planning meeting.  At the meeting, the engineers drew all sorts of cryptic diagrams and spoke a language with which I am unfamiliar, though it did use English to connect the jargon.  And I thought to myself, so this is how we programmers must look like to outsiders - cryptic indecipherable language, UML and ORD diagrams that have the appearance of being "right", and inside jokes that they don't get but seem to crack everyone else up.  It was educational to be on the "outside" for a change.