Monday, July 09, 2007

Now what?

It is such a pity that I have to earn a livelihood. Makes me wonder what I did in my previous life that merited a disqualification from inheriting an oil-well or an opium field in this life. I cant live with the fact that somebody out there has nothing better to do all day than draw on his hookah and ponder over which camel to bet his pile of gold on while I painstakingly crunch out line after line of bug infested code. It is such an unfair world.

Why do Mondays make us groan? More often than not people are inefficient at their jobs because they make uninformed choices. To a child, flashing lights and smart uniforms makes the fireman's job the perfect job. The sleek looks of an i-mac or the new Wii makes an eighteen year old wish he was a software engineer. The power of money draws young men into business. Wisdom makes old people retire. All but the last are examples of poor decisions.

For some reason there seems to be consensus that by the age of 18 one is fully capable of making important decisions. Electing the country's leader, taking a 100bhp vehicle onto the road, putting the bottle to your lips and choosing a career path all are part of a day's work once we hit that magic number. We step out confidently but before long we find ourselves in a situation much like that kid Prince found himself in - stuck in a hole deep down with no room to so much as sneeze. You goof up big enough and you'll be on national TV as well.

Coming back to my orginal problem, the milk has been spilt and now I'll look like an idiot if I cry. So how do I salvage the situation? How does a programmer at a typical Indian software company wriggle out of the hole he's stepped into? The obvious way out is to transmogrify into a manager and spend the rest of his working days looking important and making more uninformed decisions. Is there a more graceful way out?