The blizzard of OS
And here it comes...the end of another semester.
In all my time at IIT, I have never seen before a semester that could move this fast. It only seems like last week that I came here and poof!, its over. In two more days, I'll be packing my bags and going back. The sem has ended before I get a chance to blink an eye. Of course, at the end of this sem, I am blinking an 'I'.
If I look back and think about what I did this semester, I can think of infinite things - gym, swimming everyday, the usual beginning-of-sem-volleyball, infinite Quake, courses - good and bad and those countable infinite assignments. Other than the one mentioned last, all the others seem like they were there long ago, say last sem or something. It feels like this sem was cut into two parts, the first one being the one I enjoyed and the second one being the shorter one and the painful one. It has somehow settled into my mind that the first part has somehow juugged out of this sem and this sem consisted only of the second part. And I believe that this is the reason this sem seems so short to me.
I am here to talk about this second part. The part that consisted of infinitely long assignments, thanks to one course. A core course. An important course. And these assignments are what changed me a lot. I can't recall myself ever behaving in a rude manner, or showing any signs of bad temper. But this sem saw all these ill qualities surfacing in me at times. And I give the credit to the assignments that I had. The assignments that I had to do. The assignments our prof thought we can't live without. OS implementation.
And it was these assignments that took my life away from me. Every alternate weekend, we would be required to submit one project. These projects were not simple. We needed proper guidance and the documentation was horrible. It would take double the time to debug the code than to write the code. One small error would eat up hours of our time. These assignments demanded a lot of time from us. We would sit for hours in front of the monitor, wondering where to begin, where to continue and more importantly, what to do. If not for help from friends, it would have been difficult to do even half of them. And it was then when I started to get pissed off by these projects. I could see the point of doing those assignments, but there were parts where I was just doing what I was expected to do without knowing why I was doing what I was doing. There was a lot of guess-work involved. The throughput was very less with these projects. Night-outs after night-outs were proving futile. And then the buffer of patience started to overflow. I started to get angry at small things very easily. And unfortunately, I know a few people who would try to irk a man if they have the slightest hint that he's not enjoying what he's doing. This increased the rate of patience overflow. Even after knowing that I'm getting pained by the work overload, they would pretend that I am the most jobless fellow on the planet and enjoy the dumb joke with a few more people. I started to get angry at such people. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have ignored them or joined them in the laughing. But my wall of patience had been gored by the painful assignments. One evening, I shouted at a few people and felt really satisfied. Another evening, up went the finger for the first time in someone's face. This had never happened before. Along with the feeling of satisfaction, there was shock hidden somewhere inside me. I had changed. I felt a bit ackward and I realized that I was no longer the calm guy I used to be.
I knew I had to control my anger before it could do me harm. And I decided to give it some sleeping pills. I needed a break from the projects and there came exams, like uncalled saviours. Exams kept me away from projects. I sensed that this is the best time to revert the change. I apologized to the people I had shouted at. I decided to keep my tongue under control. And it worked well. I was no longer short tempered, but I was serious still. And the seriousness helped me in smashing the exams. And when the exams got over, back came the assignments. And to my surprise and relief, they didn't bring back the short temper with them. They didn't bring back the mental anguish. This was because doing them had reached the end of my priority list. I was busy with the compilers assignment. I had given up all hopes of ever finishing the OS assignment. And this knowledge of having given up kept any kind of pressure from me. The compilers assignment went well and I felt satisfaction as I had never felt before. Keeping the thought of the OS assignment away from my mind helped me a lot. And when I checked yesterday, lying in the unread box was the OS assignment. And today is when I opened it. I wonder if I'll ever mark it as unread. The submission is at 2 o'clock tomorrow and I haven't done anything. It'll be impossible to finish it in less than 24 hours. So I think I'll be getting an 'I' (incomplete) grade in this course, unless the prof takes some pity on the students and cancels the project which I think would be a wise decision.
Before I drop the keyboard I think its time to wake up the real Ashish and make sure that he is indeed the Ashish I used to know. Yeah, and the waking up is gonna take some time, for sure.
In all my time at IIT, I have never seen before a semester that could move this fast. It only seems like last week that I came here and poof!, its over. In two more days, I'll be packing my bags and going back. The sem has ended before I get a chance to blink an eye. Of course, at the end of this sem, I am blinking an 'I'.
If I look back and think about what I did this semester, I can think of infinite things - gym, swimming everyday, the usual beginning-of-sem-volleyball, infinite Quake, courses - good and bad and those countable infinite assignments. Other than the one mentioned last, all the others seem like they were there long ago, say last sem or something. It feels like this sem was cut into two parts, the first one being the one I enjoyed and the second one being the shorter one and the painful one. It has somehow settled into my mind that the first part has somehow juugged out of this sem and this sem consisted only of the second part. And I believe that this is the reason this sem seems so short to me.
I am here to talk about this second part. The part that consisted of infinitely long assignments, thanks to one course. A core course. An important course. And these assignments are what changed me a lot. I can't recall myself ever behaving in a rude manner, or showing any signs of bad temper. But this sem saw all these ill qualities surfacing in me at times. And I give the credit to the assignments that I had. The assignments that I had to do. The assignments our prof thought we can't live without. OS implementation.
And it was these assignments that took my life away from me. Every alternate weekend, we would be required to submit one project. These projects were not simple. We needed proper guidance and the documentation was horrible. It would take double the time to debug the code than to write the code. One small error would eat up hours of our time. These assignments demanded a lot of time from us. We would sit for hours in front of the monitor, wondering where to begin, where to continue and more importantly, what to do. If not for help from friends, it would have been difficult to do even half of them. And it was then when I started to get pissed off by these projects. I could see the point of doing those assignments, but there were parts where I was just doing what I was expected to do without knowing why I was doing what I was doing. There was a lot of guess-work involved. The throughput was very less with these projects. Night-outs after night-outs were proving futile. And then the buffer of patience started to overflow. I started to get angry at small things very easily. And unfortunately, I know a few people who would try to irk a man if they have the slightest hint that he's not enjoying what he's doing. This increased the rate of patience overflow. Even after knowing that I'm getting pained by the work overload, they would pretend that I am the most jobless fellow on the planet and enjoy the dumb joke with a few more people. I started to get angry at such people. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have ignored them or joined them in the laughing. But my wall of patience had been gored by the painful assignments. One evening, I shouted at a few people and felt really satisfied. Another evening, up went the finger for the first time in someone's face. This had never happened before. Along with the feeling of satisfaction, there was shock hidden somewhere inside me. I had changed. I felt a bit ackward and I realized that I was no longer the calm guy I used to be.
I knew I had to control my anger before it could do me harm. And I decided to give it some sleeping pills. I needed a break from the projects and there came exams, like uncalled saviours. Exams kept me away from projects. I sensed that this is the best time to revert the change. I apologized to the people I had shouted at. I decided to keep my tongue under control. And it worked well. I was no longer short tempered, but I was serious still. And the seriousness helped me in smashing the exams. And when the exams got over, back came the assignments. And to my surprise and relief, they didn't bring back the short temper with them. They didn't bring back the mental anguish. This was because doing them had reached the end of my priority list. I was busy with the compilers assignment. I had given up all hopes of ever finishing the OS assignment. And this knowledge of having given up kept any kind of pressure from me. The compilers assignment went well and I felt satisfaction as I had never felt before. Keeping the thought of the OS assignment away from my mind helped me a lot. And when I checked yesterday, lying in the unread box was the OS assignment. And today is when I opened it. I wonder if I'll ever mark it as unread. The submission is at 2 o'clock tomorrow and I haven't done anything. It'll be impossible to finish it in less than 24 hours. So I think I'll be getting an 'I' (incomplete) grade in this course, unless the prof takes some pity on the students and cancels the project which I think would be a wise decision.
Before I drop the keyboard I think its time to wake up the real Ashish and make sure that he is indeed the Ashish I used to know. Yeah, and the waking up is gonna take some time, for sure.
posted by Ashes are gone, they blogged here at
11:50 PM
|
1 comments
