John Hick

Close your eyes. Imagine. No...scratch that. Read this first.

Imagine a Lone Ranger- an assassin on a hunt. Sun going down the desert, light shimmering on the sand- playing tricks on the eyes. Imagine music playing in the background- something that fills you with anticipation, something that inspires, something that makes you want to beat up bad guys, something that all of a sudden makes you want to workout. And for no apparent reason, you start thinking of pigeons flying in slow motion.

Now stop imagining. This is not that kind of a story. This is not a tale of adventure. If anything, this is a sad story. This is the story of John Hick.

John Hick is a terrible assassin. Terrible- not in his deeds. Terrible as in- terrible at his job. His bullets never hit the mark, his shurikens never land right. People rejoice on the streets when they come to know John Hick is coming for them. All his targets live long and healthy lives. They are called Ikigai.

Nothing goes right for John Hick. His dog ran away one night. Left a note that read- "Woof!". Took his food bowl, squeaky toys and everything.

John wanted to be an assassin ever since he was a little boy. His parents loved him and believed in his dream. They told him- believe and he could be anything. Little John took this lesson to heart. He started doing everything you are supposed to do to become an assassin- he started wearing a black suit.

John Hick really does look smart in a suit. The effect is only slightly dampened by the dandruff that has taken permanent residence on his shoulders. Head and shoulders shampoo does nothing for him. In fact, head and shoulders have been a constant problem area in his life. Never being able to separate heads from their respective shoulders- is a problem if one is an assassin.

All this seems like a plot of a satirical comedy film about Hollywood cliches. A big movie producer thought so too. He saw great potential in John Hick's life story. But right in the pattern of anything remotely related to John Hick, the movies he made became All-Time biggest flops. In fact, it was a surprise how the movies were so successful at being failures. The last movie produced was the infamous- "John Hick 4 the love of God, let this be the last one". God really came through this time. John Hick 5 was thankfully never made.

But why am I telling you this?

"Quantum entanglement is a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon that explains how two subatomic particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space. Despite their vast separation, a change induced in one will affect the other.”

The fate of this blog and the adventures of John Hick have somehow become quantum-ly entangled. John Hick sneezes and the universe blesses me with a RunTimeError. He stubs his toe somewhere and my PC crashes.

John Hick is that butterfly, which flaps its wings in some random forest, causing disturbance in the air currents, to lead a stray cosmic ray that was going about its day- minding its own business, sending its little ray children to school, doing what cosmic rays do- to suddenly change its path and hit my computer's transistors to cause a bit flip and crash my program.

All the errors and bugs in my code, they are not because I am bad coder. No..no..no..it is all because of John Hick.

This series of blogs all about cleaning up after. About getting my code to work. About error codes that don't look like plain English. About StackOverFlow deep dives. It is also about quick fixes that saved me a lot of time and headache. It is about tricky maneuvering, trying to parallel park in the narrow alleyways of programming.

So, if you would like to see me stumbling, tumbling, humpty-dumptying my way through my work, read on!