Bewitched

I have wished quite often that I was the old kind of engineer. The kind who built machines, houses, bridges, furnaces, cars and clocks. The kind who uses pencils, sharpeners and A3 sized papers. The kind who had to roll up his sleeves, put on helmets or wear high boots to watch his designs materialize. The kind of engineer that I am generally sits at his desk cluttered with wires and phones and unwashed coffee mugs and punches keys. At the end of the day, sleeves remain unsoiled, papers unused, pencils untouched and the clutter unmoved. The world hardly changes. No floors added to a skyscraper. No pillars erected. No metal melted. Nothing moulded. Nothing shaped.

It is only to please the crowd, ofcourse, that inspite of drawing up designs, building, watching my machines work, watching them march in step to my command that I wish to abandon them in favor of their worldly counterparts. For, in all earnest, a server crunching numbers, a mind numbing number of them, accurate to a bit, while being relocated a million times a second is no lesser a marvel of technology than is an airborne 747. But, like the cursed invincible Greek hero, it doesn’t stand a chance against the flying machine. For unlike the flying machine that swaggers in the open skies while jaws drop, the server works its magic silently tucked away in a metal box sitting snugly in an aircooled basement. Pathetically unromantic.

But…

At times, when the madness hits the roof, when the sound of the metal and the numbing beckoning of the soiled sleeves in my head drown the sound of the keystrokes, it is the thought of the conundrums that nails me down. For inspite of the curse of unromanticism, the conundrums are the reason the heroes flourish. Albeit cursed. Like the zombies serving the mighty hermits the engineers of my kind are bewitched by the conundrums. I would not trade them for soiled sleeves. For watching my ships stand the storm. For watching jaws drop while my machines fly. For nothing.

For I believe, and with good reason, that no cheering of crowds shall match the magic of the conundrums.

They come packaged as little truths that defy reason. And you stare at them in disbelief as the voice in your head says Thy shall not disbelieve. Thy shall not doubt the power of reason. And at that moment you ask yourself There is no spoon? Ofcourse there is. It is right there. You can see your face in it, mercilessly skewed. And for once you know - it’s rightly deserved. You make some observations - read some logs, verify some numbers and check some statuses. And voila!!...there you have a perfect conundrum - some observations that imply the impossible – the logical inconsistency of the underlying system. Anything that implies something impossible is false. You know that. You believe that. You better do or the wrath of the gods of pure reason shall reduce your world to ashes. The world of truths and proofs and implications and beliefs. But what do you trust more? The spoon in your hand or the voice in your head? You have been there before. Right there. Holding the same spoon and hearing the same voice. The voice has always been right. You remind yourself of that. But the spoon. I can see it. I can feel it. I can read the log. I can query the database. I see the output. I can validate the result. It is true. I am staring at the impossible. My Gods are defied. My world burns…

And then yet again… the voice triumphs. I know the conundrum was an illusion. There was no spoon indeed. The Gods have been appeased. My world is far too powerful for the illusions. For the conundrums. My Gods shall protect me and my world. Always. My world shall stand the test of illusions. The test of conundrums. The test of misread logs and mistaken measurements….

I rise at the end of a day’s work. The coffee rings on my desk need cleaning. The wires need some sorting and the phone needs some rest. I smirk at my own blindness. At my own madness. But I need no crowds to cheer. I need no jaws to drop. For in a day’s work, I saw my world burn. I saw it fall. And then I saw it rise from the ashes. I saw the spoon. I saw it turn into thin air. I would be back here again. I shall see the spoon again and I shall see it vanish. For no soiled sleeves would I trade the conundrums.