Welcome to the machine
This song by Pink Floyd inspired me so much that I decided to take up a career in research very much against the whims and fancies of like minded, peace loving people of my time. No no, this is not another one of my "Life sucks" posts where I am complaining about pretty much everything in life (although that is precisely my state of mind right now). Interestingly the sympathies of the most unexpected of people arose after my previous post. "Hang on Right there man! You are going to start enjoying soon!" Anyway I seem to be digressing from the point as usual.... The intention of this post was originally to share one of the most bewildering aspects of the ambitions of this world and its pupils.

The post is named "welcome to the machine". So you guessed it right, it has everything to do with "the machine". The CNC machine to be precise. For the uninitiated a Computer Numerical Control machine which one of my good friends wisely calls the hole drilling machine. Hole drilling! Seems to be one of the simlest, most innocent things to do! I mean after all what could it possibly involve! Imagine driving a nail into the wall to hang a painting! To a level headed bloke with reasonable amount of sense, having an elaborate machinery for this simple task would sound quite foolish.
The trouble starts when people want to "automate" the process of driving the nail into the wall! Now all those machinery lovers, please don't go overboard and start lamenting about how it simplifies life and makes things faster. I mean for heaven's sake get off your ass and get yourself a hammer!
Inspite of what I may appear to be saying, I am quite ok with the automation as long as it makes me work less. But as you may rightly have guessed, it is never so! That's because automation, more often than not, relies on this most unreliable piece of machinery invented by man called the COMPUTER! Its sometimes quite scary that these things can do things they were never supposed to.
When the ABACUS was invented all it could do was addition and subtraction. I sometimes sincerely wish that things never got more complicated. Because these things went on to control, as my good friend likes to call it, hole drilling.
Well so here is what prompted me to say all these unpleasant things about the one thing that most of us can't imagine a life without! This CNC machine in our lab is controlled by this, yeah you guessed it right, computer! So as it is supposed to do(I have started believing so), it shuts itself down quite unexpectedly quite often. Obviously, once this thing shuts down, it becomes almost impossible for a reasonably well educated person to bring it back to the state it was BEFORE it decided to switch itself off so that it can continue to serve this "hole drilling" machine. So it was decided to connect an "Uninterrupted" Power supply (or the UPS as some would like to call it) to this darned thing! That looked like a pretty simple job to me. Even I could handle that!! But I was terribly mistaken! As soon as this computer started receiving power through the UPS the computer decides to let out an explosion (or as a few moderated people like to call it, a "pop sound") and ironically, shut itself down forever. Quite amusing isn't it? Well trust me, it was not! When I told my advisor about this, his mouth was literally left wide open!!!!! Then he starts frantically running up and down the hallway looking for people who would know how to fix a "computer". As was expected, each and every soul in that building knew how to use a computer! But it took us an hour and a half to find someone who could FIX one! Finally this computer guy says that probably the power supply, the motherboard and the motion cards on the computer conked off. I had to fight my instincts which were yelling out asking what the hell is left if these things conk off! And if all the things that he said DID really conk off, it meant an expenditure of about 25000$ for my advisor. At this point, I had already started wishing that my advisor decides to withdraw his restraining order and yell at me."How the hell do you manage to screw up every single time." or more optimistically, "Its alright! It was probably not your fault." But he decided against both. Finally this guy comes down to the lab and starts inspecting around and realizes that the computer that served that machine was a different one from what he had dealt with earlier. I was left wondering why man decided to go ahead and create MORE than one type of the same machinery that he did not himself understand! After about 3 hrs of deliberation by the end of which I was quite close to a nevous breakdown, it was discovered that the power supply unit had conked off. I knew that!!! That's where the explosion came from! After class XII I had decided to give up chemistry. And rightly so, because you could never reach an answer in that subject. You could only JUSTIFY the answer that you came to know was correct. I really wish I had realised this about computers too back then! Because with each passing day, this notion of mine is being strengthened by unknown external and internal forces.