What’s the worse that can happen to the digital prosumer? (Yes, I stole that term from some Youtube Video and intend to popularize it; it means the producer-consumer). I know you’d say taking whichever device s/he can use for accessing the most basic app like Notepad. If that’s your answer then read on; if it ain’t still read on anyway. My experience
So they took away the keyboard, mouse and keypads from me. They weren’t satisfied, so they handed me a sheet of metal to replace Notepad, a scribbler and some other tools whose names I don’t recall intentionally. It gets worse, they forced me to call some stupid sharp pointed piece of metal “engineer’s pen”, I preferred “mechanic’s pen” because to me the engineer’s pen is the mouse… which engineer won’t need it by 2015?
It gets worse!
They then told me not to use my PHONE!!! while in the workshop i.e. no tweeting, no facebook, no calls (I’m okay with that). Oh no, not for an hour, not two, not three… it took more than a quarter of a day; that meant I’d to cut on my sleeping time to account for internet time lost.
And even worse!
No sitting in the workshop! The obvious and logical thing the programmer/designer of a computer soft/hardware has got to do is to sit, stare at the screen with a mountain dew/coffee by your side, headphones on, listen to rock music with 4-5 .pdf documents open for references and a few web pages…plus the necessary programs running… you know what I am talking about… and think! Now I had to stand, think and work in an extremely noisy and life threatening environment and still think!
Too bad for the worst
I haven’t told you the worst part yet and I don’t wanna talk about it.
Just when you didn’t expect!
The best part! I read about this guy – in Primary 5 at 10 so I don’t recall his name but the book contained my first readings of philosophy, who used to search for the positive cause every time he encounters a negative. So when everything was going really bad, I figured out a way to have fun… I chose to hit the metal and cut it, weld some red hot beads while emptying my frustration. It was awesome seeing the spatters from the welding joints. Before that, I only bent aluminium plates and soldered electronic components.
Maybe taking a little break from LabVIEW, Multisim and Notepad wasn’t a very bad thing after all… but calling some piece of metal the “engineer’s pen” is unacceptable, I shall continue calling it the “mechanic’s pen”!
“Those who don’t wear rubber gloves think it’s fancy.”
-Frank Odongkara-