You were in school. There was your mother to drag you out.
You were in college. You had the luxury of letting go.
You are working. You have a stack full of research material and thousands of lines of code waiting; your supervisor whining. You don’t need anything else to stun you out of the bed, do you?
Though we have disposed all the “old guy” training techniques like yoga and meditation claiming them to be a stressed man’s lifesavers, you have just opted for the deadliest and the toughest of them….the job routine. It wakes you up when half the guys your age are buried in dreams and blankets. It forces you to cleanse your body in the cold water simulating a naked run in the arctic wherein all you can do is shout and shiver. It chains you to a chair that is so uncomfortable regardless of its fabric and flexibility. It makes sure you carry yourself with the demeanor of a business magnate whilst all you are inside is a ‘bolt’ waiting for the whistle to be blown. Yes, it trains you and you’ll know it.
You might be a chemical engineer or anyone else who hates math or despises programming. You might have opted for something more comforting to do. But the boss is never content with what you put on the plate. He asks more. The job asks more. Hence, it teaches you something more than just whining-living with your worst nightmares. You might not pick up writing programs(*). You might end up googling random words and end up with tailless codes that might take weeks of debugging to give an output.
But you would’ve learnt typing (or googling codes), just enough to see through the day, everyday. The job would’ve taught you to. It teaches you how small the life is or how cruel the time can be. You might chew up a thousand lines of code in a couple of hours and sit with content. But you can hear it yell “Faster, here’s another one”.Yes, life is short. Time is short. But the jobs never are. You might prove lucky to get yourself a computer and a workplace with a coffee-mug. But this is when your brain tells you “Whoa, whoa. You might need to work you pants off here”. Yes, you have to; else it is just a worthless wait till the payday. All you do is follow a drop dead routine that is scripted on your forehand in bold. The only breath of fresh air is what your stick notes prompts, something different from yesterday. It might constantly question your choice of working with your worst enemy that was no better than fetching you the worst grades, but it is what defines you and demands the best of you. The defining moment could be when you loosen that extra button of your shirt, pull up your sleeves and go for it or sit down and grab a cup of tea or coffee, waiting for them to galvanize your gray matter. Yes, you will start finding ways to make things work. And when that happens, your job would have just taught you how to drag yourself to the finish….And you’ll know it.
*Programming redoubled my faith in GOD!
