ooks cluttered Andrew's desk… but the real clutter was on the computer in front of him. Going through the algorithms on his screen for the umpteenth time Andrew cursed silently. He was extremely frustrated, because something wasn't working… Where was the bug?
As a kid sometimes he'd stare out of the side window of the back seat of his parent's car on a long journey watching the clouds in the sky and dreaming thoughts that were unique only to children. Children were such gifts to the world because of the innocence of their thoughts. Andrew remembered how he'd seen little snow dragons up there… sometimes other wonderfully weird creatures would form up there and stare down at him with friendly smiles on their faces. As a young boy Andrew had believed that they were blessing him in their own cheery ways. He thought of the clouds as angels looking down upon him, embracing him. They'd make him happy because one day he'd grow up to be a man and everything would be better. He'd be able to watch TV after eight 'o clock, he'd be driving fancy cars and he'd own a dog, he'd be able to do the things he wanted to because he was all grown up.
But now… staring at the monitor in front of him, he admitted to himself that as a kid he'd been very much misled. Life is never the fairy tale conveyed to you on TV. He'd been sitting in front of his computer for the last six months because tomorrow he was to take an examination, which would decide his future. And his future was not his own to freely use or abuse. His future was a cage set aside for him to toil in. Like everyone else, Andrew knew that if he had to be caged he'd at least prefer to pick his cell. Some cells are better than other cells and he'd be damned if he would be denied his choice of captivity…
Stepping into his procedures one by one he monitored the movement of data through his variables making sure that the correct constants were being assigned in the critical areas of his program code. Only one mistake: a spelling error, a mistake in logic, a misdirected assignment, was the cause of a subtle error that was crashing the entire application. As a student software developer Andrew knew that there was no room for mistakes in his chosen career. Nothing would do except perfection because anything less would lead to a system failure.
In that way a program was much like life.
Life also had its variables and its constants. Its constants were the unwritten laws of nature, the theorems known to science. Its variables were the fluctuating circumstances of your present situation, the sub total of your achievements and failures that depicted your own spreadsheet of success. It reflected the result that life had allotted you from your own decisions and actions.
Where the similar flow charts of life and that of a structured computer program differed noticeably was when you encountered chance. There was no such thing as a perfectly random event in computer programming; it could only be simulated. Everything mathematical worked by means of logic, and yet life passed those constraints, leaped the boundaries of what is known into the Darklands beyond. It dared you to reach out and grasp at it, taking the big gamble. It wanted to see you gasp in defeat and put your tail between your legs and slink away back into the Lowlands of low confidence and no self-esteem. Andrew was sick of low confidence and no self-esteem.
He knew of people that had achieved the leap to the Highlands by going through the Darklands. They had risked the goblins and the creatures of chance to make it by means of fate, or luck, to the other side. He respected the ones that had made it, but he also despised them when he came across them, because they'd look at him as he walked passed them in his tattered jeans and with the hole in his shoe. The look in their eyes as they beheld him was one of indifference, because they seemed to regard him as unimportant.
Andrew wanted to feel important. He wanted to make a success of his life. But chance and the other difference between life and computing had been his pitfall. You couldn't go back in life. You couldn't do what he was doing now as he crawled through his procedural code line by line to find his mistake. You couldn't live life in sub procedures; you couldn't rewrite life; you lived life in the unprotected environment of chance. But you could make it through the Darklands if you had a proven formula.
Andrew didn't want to take too many chances anymore; he'd spent too much time failing to have any misconceptions about the term "graceful loser". He wasn't about to spend the rest of his life in a cage created by his own talents, a cage that had to be toiled in to impress the warden of life. There was no way Andrew was prepared to spend all his life working himself to death for the key to his cell when there was an easier way. You see; Andrew knew that you had to use a certain amount of logic to get through it all. You had to plan your voyage through the Darklands to get to the Highlands beyond. And Andrew had planned his journey for the last six months…
Bingo! How simple it was when you were looking in the right place. It was so amazing how such a small deviation from logic could have such a dire impact on the entire program. As Andrew corrected his error a slow, satisfied smile spread on his face. Yes! He thought. You definitely needed logic to make it through, but you also had to get through the chance factor that life throws at you. And yet what if you create your own chance factor? Could it work?
Andrew would find out tomorrow morning when he tested the program. This project cycle would never go beyond the testing phase, because tomorrow he'd log into the local computer of the downtown banking system and gamble his life, with his most logical deck of cards… adding the last telling figure to his personal spreadsheet of life.
