Distracted ! Big time !!

My first job was in the IT department of a manufacturing company, established long time back.

One morning I found that the 3-pin-top of power cable of my PC broken. I found an opportunity to apply my electrical fundas, once learnt but forgotten, by replacing the broken pin-top with a new one. As I was connecting the Earth, Phase and Neutral ( Green, Red and Blue wires ) and tightening the screws,  I got distracted, badly. Two young lasses looked like college students just walked past my work area.  For a moment I became like a “caged lion” in the Mysore zoo, which had just spotted the caretaker holding the bucket full of meat meat.

Just out of college, being bachelor, male dominated environment around, average age of employee being 40+, can anybody blame me for becoming one like that?  Only difference was that the lion was 100% sure that it would get what it wanted, my chances of success were remote. Never the less I got fully excited.

As I got over with those nice moments, I completed my work, plugged in and switched on the power. “Bhoom…” a thud noise and smoke emerged out of the PC and our whole work area was blacked out.

My boss was the first one to rush to the spot. Being a hands-on person he could easily make out that I made a terrible mistake, interchanged Earth and Phase wire. I started thinking worst things. If boss reports this as my carelessness, either cost of the PC would be recovered from my salary, which would mean I will be with no money for next 6 months. Or I would be shown the pink slip, in that case that period could be as high as 12 months or more, me looking out for a new job!

I simply admitted to him that I messed up and forgot to recheck the connections due to my excitement induced by those new arrivals. Since he was also young, sportive person, and a bachelor, he fully understood my case. He covered it up. I didn't have to pay any penalty for the damage. Mother board of the PC had 90% burns, no chance of revival. So the vendor replaced the mother board itself and PC was back on my table with the same look and feel !Readers will be curious to know what happened to those 2 beautiful people.They had come to meet my boss just to take an interview. Thank god they went off in one hour's time else the huge monstrous mainframe would have blown next.

My bad experience with that “high end” PC did not stop there.

The PC had 256K RAM, two 5 ¼ inch floppy drives A & B, no hard disk, don’t remember the CPU but it’s from Intel, MS DOS V1.0 operating system. ( Now you know why your brand new laptop hard disc naming starts from C and not A or B ). Only software I used was Wordstar (WS), a word-processing package. I have to insert DOS disk in drive A and boot the machine. It will make a grinding noise for 5 minutes to finish loading and then I need to pull it out and replace it with WS disk. Another 5 minutes of grinding to load WS.  Once I insert the data disk (with a huge data capacity if 512 KB) in drive B then I’m quickly up and running to type my document.

It took me 10 days to complete a 15 page report to submit to my prof at the institute. People might wonder whether I was so inefficient in those days too. I could type only after office hours, that too my typing was limited to just one finger -my right hand forefinger-  searching for each character on the broad keyboard.  In addition one can imagine with the above spec what speed my high-end PC would have provided me.

As I just finished the document and saved, I started exploring some advanced DOS commands, till then my knowledge was limited to DIR, COPY etc. The first one that struck me was FORMAT. I thought it would format my well written document in a much better way. I typed Format. It asked for the drive and I gave B: where my data resided. While I was reading a message that displayed, I got distracted. This time it was by my friend who wanted to know whether I needed a lift on his bike to go back home. What was there to think so much to say Y/N? Yes, there were things I had to consider. If I said Yes, my friend would definitely make me buy dinner for him. If I said No, I had to walk 3 Kms in the dark. It took a while to arrive at a decision and finally I said Yes once those stray dogs came into mind. Resumed my work by pressing Return Key without reading the warning message ( Later I read the message in the manual : “ALL THE DATA WILL BE ERASED, PRESS ENTER TO CONFIRM”). Ten minutes of grinding, it was ready for me to check how well the data was formatted. Should I narrate more? I lost 10 days of my “forefinger typed” data in front of me in 10 minutes because of a stupid distraction.

How many times I had been distracted like this? Almost all software programs written by me were full of bugs, not because I lacked programming skills, but I was prone to distractions. In many occasions I had jumped the signal while driving, watching interesting scenes on both sides of the road. I can go on and on - I had discarded/ reworked/abruptly stopped,  many good things all due to distractions.

After each of those losses or mishaps, I had been telling myself that next time onward while I am doing any serious work, I will shut off all my senses, including the 6^th one, and fully focus on my work. My advice to you is .....Wow……………….some nice smell is coming from the kitchen. Let me go and see what it is! I’m gone !!