Valentine's Day Shenoy

I was getting worried during the last semester of my Masters. It was November and the only job offer that I had was to be a system administrator at Microsoft, and that too, at Redmond. I kept asking myself what I will do there? Having trained and evangelised for the *nix (Unix, Linux, Solaris and their ilk, and recently the Apple intel boxes) systems for most of my life, I would be mocked and insulted by my friends and foes alike (Oh! yeah, I have a lot of foes, thanks to me running expect scripts on their terminals and getting their passwords [ an inside reference to http://www.facebook.com/harishjp ] ). I was frantically hoping that Stallman or Linus would come and save me...

That was when lady luck smiled to me. There was this startup in Mountain View, California, who wanted a programmer with proven Unix skills. I immediately applied. And got in, I did (balls to you Yoda, I can do this too). Thus began my affair with the Macbook pro, 17'' glass screen, black keyboard and multitouch trackpad goodness. I spent the first 2 days playing on it, you know, writing shell scripts, setting up aliases, setting up my vimrc, my bashrc, my cron jobs - it was so awesome.

But it all came down last week, like a pack of cards. Some asshole on the caltrain stole my bag. And with that, I lost my baby. I was listening to music and must've dozed off a bit, y'know. I never really thought that anybody would bother to take my rather shambolic bag with the logos of possibly every major software company in the world. Bloody bastard. There were so many ugly PCs lying right there. Why did he not steal them?

I immediately went and ordered a new box. And Apple said that it will take me 3 weeks to get it! 3 effing weeks! I was wondering how I was going to get through these 3 weeks?

And at work, the only other laptops they have are the old PowerPC Mac boxes or Windows PC boxes. And I have to get some work done urgently. So, I decided to bite the bullet and connect to the linux boxes through ssh. Everybody has access to our CM cluster, they are like prostitute machines. Everyone has fun with them.

All this happened yesterday, and I am already done with this horrible box. I cannot take it any more. And I definitely cannot do this for 3 more weeks...

That was what was going on my mind when the phone rang. I picked it up feeling more depressed than ever. It was a policeman. He said that they had found a bag marked DD with a computer in it and a visiting card with my name. They asked me whether I had lost something in the train yesterday. I could not believe my ears. I deliriously muttered out a yes and said that I will get there right away...

I reached the police station in my pajamas. The policeman asked me to identify myself. Thrusting my driving licence in his hands, I asked him where my computer was. He pointed to a black bag lying on the table. He said that they had recovered it from a stolen goods' market where the thief was selling the whole thing off for 300 dollars! He asked me to go through the bag and check whether anything had changed.

I quickly pulled the laptop out, and booted it. What I saw left me flummoxed. Windows 7 was booting up. The scoundrel had installed Windows on it. The machine was useless for me now.

After that, I just went through the motions. I signed on the letter that the policeman gave me, but I was crestfallen.

I just got back home. In my urge to get my work done, I had even run scripts on the Chandramukhi cluster. And now, I have this worthless Macbook Paro, my true love right in front of me. And in front of you, my beloved, I now lay down my *nix life. As a *nix programmer, I am dead.

-- /dev/das

The Shenoy is a reference to Narendra Shenoy.